Peter Johnston was born in 1941 while his father was bunkered down in the siege of Tobruk. He was raised by devout Catholic parents in a happy home with siblings who remain close friends. He graduated in medicine at Melbourne University in 1965. After three years working in hospitals, he spent a year with the army, mostly in Vietnam, before practising as a GP for 51 years.
The death of his baby son and his wife’s illness led to a search for healing, and ultimately a search for meaning and purpose in life. This brought an ‘awakening’ in 1980.
He continued to practise conventional medicine after this experience because most of his patients believed in medicine and surgery. But for those who had conditions like chronic fatigue, cancer, or chronic illnesses incurable by surgery or medicine, he introduced them to alternative therapies.
In the 1990s, he was president of the Whole Health Institute, an organisation open to anyone interested in a holistic approach to healthcare. It included GPs, physiotherapists, acupuncturists, psychologists, naturopaths, and others interested in the subject.
He wrote a book on holistic medicine in 2008 and updated it in 2012 and 2020.
In 1981, he attended a Mind-made Health conference where Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, homeopathy, yoga, and Indian medicine were all discussed. The consensus was that the motives of pharmaceutical companies were suspect.
However, it was the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision to mandate vaccines for the 12-15-year-olds that led to his resignation from medical practice. In his mind, forcing healthy young people to take an experimental drug violated both the Hippocratic Oath and the Nuremberg Code. He has since worked to alert the public to the dangers of the dodgy science behind some of the products from pharmaceutical companies.