About the Author 

 Erica Elliott is a medical doctor specializing in family practice and environmental medicine, with a busy private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Erica was born into a large family with a Swiss mother and an American father. Throughout her childhood, she moved with her family from one part of the world to another due to her father's work. Her schooling began in England and ended in Germany, where she graduated from high school. The following summer, she pursued her interest in the arts in Florence, Italy, before returning to the States to attend Antioch College.
 

Erica came to medicine later than most medical students, spending a decade pursuing other careers and interests in search of her true purpose. She taught grade school on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, where she learned the language and crossed into a whole different world, and later taught Indigenous children in the mountains of Ecuador while serving in the Peace Corps. On weekends during her Peace Corps service, she climbed in the Andes, and in 1976 became the first American woman to reach the summit of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere at over 23,000 feet.
 

Back in the States, Erica earned her master's degree in outdoor education and taught rock climbing and wilderness survival for Outward Bound in the Colorado Rockies. After her first year of medical school, she led an all-women's expedition to the summit of Denali in Alaska.
 

After graduating from the University of Colorado Medical School and completing her residency in family practice in Denver, Erica worked in Cuba, New Mexico, fulfilling her National Health Service obligation while treating Hispanic and Navajo families. She went on to work in a clinic for indigent care, a local emergency room, a women's clinic, and a multispecialty clinic.
 

In 1993, Erica helped found The Commons, a cohousing community in Santa Fe, where she opened her own private practice, raised her son, and continues to live and practice medicine today. She later became board certified in Environmental Medicine, a field not taught in medical school, and patients began coming to her from across the country in search of the root causes of conditions no one else could diagnose. Affectionately known as "the Health Detective," she has spent decades since helping people others had given up on.
 

Erica has given radio talks, interviews, webinars, and workshops at the Esalen and Omega Institutes, along with a TEDx talk on living in cohousing.
 

She is co-author of Prescriptions for a Healthy House and author of the memoir trilogy A Healer's Path: Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert: My Life Among the Navajo People, From Mountains to Medicine: Scaling the Heights in Search of My Calling, and From Doctor to Healer: The Mountain Lion's Gift. Her books are available in paperback, digital, and audio, the last narrated by Erica herself. She is currently at work on a fourth book, The Medical Detective: Simple Solutions for Solving Medical Mysteries.