James Carter: Lifetime Achievement Award

Remarks by John Parks Trowbridge, MD

James Carter MD was given a lifetime achievement award at the Pittsburgh meeting "Getting Well with Food and Nutrition."  ICIM will also make a donation in his name to the William Mitchell Scholarship Fund.

When you’ve been a part of integrative medicine’s history for almost 30 years, it’s sobering to look back and recall when you first started – I looked up to docs who had been doing chelation and such for 5 years or 8 years and thought that they had more experience than anyone!

Now I’m one of the gray-beards, and I’m thrilled to take this opportunity to recognize one of my mentors for most of those years of my learning.

Like the rest of us, he earned a medical doctorate – then he has gone beyond, authoring dozens of professional articles and guiding many of us along our inquiries into how the body works and how our treatments can be made most effective.  

He has worked tirelessly to introduce our way of thinking into the hallowed halls of academe – and he has been equally committed to having US understand the best ways to adopt scientific discoveries into our practices.

Our rich friendship is filled with times when he has never failed to offer assistance and counsel, and I know that I am one of many who has enjoyed his attention.  His wife has patiently encouraged the time and energies he has devoted to us, his friends, and to our passion, our kind of healthcare.

He has presented lectures to us many times.  His style is simple:  take the basic science facts, combine them with an advanced understanding of human physiology, and weave these into a rich tapestry displaying clearly the future of nutritional chemistry in the prevention and treatment of human ailments.  

And he shared these ideas not just with us but with his many medical and graduate students at Tulane, where he was Professor and Chief of the Section on Nutrition.  

Trained at Northwestern and Columbia Universities, he has served on the faculty at Vanderbilt and Meharry.  AND as a Consultant to the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the Agency for International Development, an editorial advisor to Prevention Magazine.  

His list of accomplishments is too long for recitation here, but note that he was one of only a few dozen to receive a Faculty Fellowship from the Milbank Memorial Fund to develop a professional career as a medical educator in nutrition – and THAT was 40 years ago!

We have been blessed to enjoy his long leadership on our Scientific Review Board, our Institutional Review Board, our Board of Directors – in 1988, he was elected to life membership in our organization and appointed as Research Advisor to our Board.  In 1988, he helped plan the first FDA-approved study of chelation, which was aborted by the first Gulf War.  

In 1990, he coauthored a landmark double-blind study on chelation in peripheral vascular disease, published in the Journal of the National Medical Association – no other major journal would touch this politically-hot topic!  

 
Those of you who have not read his superb book, Racketeering in Medicine, have missed a critical part of OUR history – read it next week!


I am honored now, on behalf of ICIM, to present this Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award to James
Puckette Carter, our friend, mentor, and colleague.