My path

Ana Steindorff PinheiroI have been a doctor for over 15 years.

Brief CV
  • I am a member of Mezis, an association of German doctors who are opposed to corruption. Mezis is linked to the international organization No Free Lunch.

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  • Interview on the subject of eating a vegetarian or vegan diet during pregnancy, while breast feeding, and for babies and young children. The interview was conducted by the vegan and vegetarian organization Proveg.
  • I agree with and have signed up to the True Health Initiative (an initiative for health information  based on scientific facts and independent from economic ties).

I have practiced medicine in Portugal, Germany, Ireland, France, South Africa and Mozambique. In these countries and over this period of time I have come to know the many different aspects of medicine.

As a young doctor, chronic illnesses scared me because medicine had so little it could do for them. They were called chronic illnesses because they were incurable. It was sad to prescribe drugs and watch while people became more and more ill; it made me feel like there was no hope. Because of this, and also because of some medical emergencies that I would have liked to treat more effectively, I went on to specialize in anaesthesia and emergency medicine. During this period I worked mostly in emergency medicine and intensive care. Highly technical western medicine is very successful for treatment after accidents. It was a very enriching experience to save lives and help people get better in this way.

However, then came the experiences of medicine as an industry. Economic interests are increasingly important in the world, and that doesn’t cease to be the case when crossing the frontier into the discipline of medicine; indeed, economic interests seem to be an inescapable part of “progress”.

Around this time I had a chance encounter with lifestyle medicine for the first time. Medicine for various lifestyles…..very effective and yet, for lack of funds, a virtually forgotten area of medicine.

This area of medicine fascinated me from the start. It was scientific and precise, yet also holistic and humane. From then on I specialized in the various types of lifestyle medicine, particularly in medical nutrition based on unprocessed plants.

I felt a new flush of enthusiam for medicine from this time in 2015 onwards, and this led me to do another spell in general clinical practice.