Is Ontarios College of Physicians and Surgeons persecuting alternative health practitioners?
By: Bruce Livesey Joanna Smith never heard the gunshot – but she did find her husband’s body. It was Dec. 21, 1992, and a real estate agent had shown up at the Smiths’ farm, west of Ottawa. So Joanna went looking for her 52-year-old husband, Dr. Michael Smith, and found him on the floor of his office, a .22-calibre rifle in his hand. He’d put the barrel in his mouth before pulling the trigger. Smith says her husband committed suicide because, two weeks previously, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) – the body that regulates Ontario’s 26,000 doctors – had yanked his licence to practise medicine. Despondent over being unable to support his wife and children, Smith “figured he was worth more dead than alive,” surmises Joanna. The college has become a battleground in the tug-of-war between conventional and naturopathic medicines Today, Joanna places responsibility for her husband’s death on the shoulders of the CPSO and the investigation it launched against him. She b
