About Dr. Kidd

Neural Therapy author Robert Kidd, MD, CM, has been practicing medicine in Canada since 1970, beginning with several years in emergency medicine. The practical aspects of dealing with acute injuries and illness appealed to him at first, but after a few years in emergency medicine, he began to feel a sense of unease about many of the patients he treated.

Dr. Kidd became increasingly concerned with his patients suffering from common, distressing—but non-life-threatening —conditions such as migraine, backache, sciatica, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety and depression. These conditions did not usually lead to death or "serious" illness, but were serious for the patient and could be as disabling as a grave disease. Hiding behind the technical jargon was the fact that little was known about the causes of these conditions. The treatments offered, therefore, were mainly drugs to suppress symptoms—but that did nothing to cure or deal with the root causes of the illness.

Before beginning his medical studies, Dr. Kidd had seriously considered a research career in physiology. His long-time interest in "how things work" resurfaced, leading him to wonder why these common medical conditions were so neglected in medical training and research.

Backache was the first condition he began to study. Dr. Kidd became intrigued by the relief that some patients reported from chiropractic and set out to investigate spinal manipulation. He learned not only that manipulation can be effective, but that there are scientific explanations of how it works.

This discovery showed him there was more information available than any medical school could hold. Much of it lay in basic scientific research that had simply never been applied. Some information came from medical practices that had fallen out of fashion. Some lay in veterinary medicine. And great stores of knowledge existed in other medical systems such as osteopathy, naturopathy and chiropractic. These systems are held in low regard by conventional medicine, but Dr. Kidd discovered that they had rarely, if ever, been examined by outsiders in an unbiased way.

Dr. Kidd also found huge differences between medical practices in various countries and cultures. Some of these countries, such as Germany, have as high, or higher, scientific standards than Canadian or American medicine; others, including China, have ancient traditions with thousands of years of observation and experience.

From German medicine, Dr. Kidd came across neural therapy, an approach to medical problems centering on the body's nervous system. This treatment method was particularly attractive to Dr. Kidd because it is grounded in Western scientific concepts of how the body works, and also overlaps in many ways with osteopathy and certain aspects of Oriental medicine.

Dr. Kidd has spent the last 25 years studying and attempting to combine the best of these diverse sources into an integrated medical system. He has published a small portion of his research, and has taught in Canada, the U.S. and Britain.

He has also been involved in medical educational organizations and has held numerous positions, including president of both the American and Canadian Associations of Orthopaedic Medicine and editor of the Journal of Orthopaedic Medicine.

Dr. Kidd received his medical degree (MD, CM) from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1970, and a bachelor of science degree in physiology (BSc), with honours, in 1966.

He and his family have operated a small farm in the upper Ottawa Valley for more than 30 years. This farming experience has provided rich insights into the nutritional relationships between soils, food and health.