about

Susan Baxter is a Vancouver-based writer and speaker. Baxter’s eclectic areas of interest have taken her from humour to hemodialysis; chaos to cardiac disease; jokes to gender studies. She began writing after finishing her undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University and a brief stint working at CBC-TV. After a short-lived career as a standup comic, she moved to writing for television and then print, where she’s stayed ever since. During those first years her writing took her to a wide range of places, from the Fraser River at four in the morning (on a Greenpeace dinghy) to Molly’s Reach. Then, quite by chance, she was asked to write a series of articles on heart transplants. Her writing (and research) since that time has focused on health and medicine, notably sifting through the complex morass that modern medicine, sorting out such ambiguous terms such as “preventive” care and “evidence-based medicine”.

As a medical writer, Susan Baxter began writing for both doctors and patients in such diverse publications as Family Practice, Medical Post, Psychology Today, Health Watch, You Magazine, Chatelaine, among others. She attended dozens of medical conferences and wrote on conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s Disease to xenotransplantation.

By the early 2000s, writing on medicine from a journalistic standpoint palled, and she returned to university, finishing an interdisciplinary doctorate at Simon Fraser University in 2006. Her dissertation, Medicine, Metaphors and Metaphysics, is an analysis of restrictive formularies from the standpoint of health economics, ethics, social anthropology and communications via the lens of clinical medicine.

As a writer, independent scholar and teacher, Baxter spends her time sifting through medical texts and journals in an attempt to demystify the morass of medical advice we are subjected to as individuals. To that end, she has recently authored The Estrogen Errors; Why Progesterone is Better for Women’s Health, a book on women’s reproductive hormones, for which she invited Vancouver endocrinologist Jerilynn C. Prior on board as co-author. The book, which runs the gamut of women’s health from the menstrual cycle and menopause to breast cancer, cardiac disease and osteoporosis, clarifies the often conflicting advice women are given with respect to hormones and “HRT” (notably the estrogen bias that exists) and is a guide for women and their primary care physicians.

In her spare time Baxter likes to read mystery novels, listen to jazz and ride slow trains. She lives in Vancouver with her husband, physician Robert Hewko and two opinionated  cats.