January 23, 2013 – The founder of Passeport Santé, Christian Lamontagne, at the same time journalist, author and publisher, died on January 9 at his home, in the mountain of Sutton, on the southern border of Quebec (Canada). Suffering from lung cancer since 2001, he had a lung lobe removed in 2002 and had managed to control the disease for a very long time, thanks mainly to traditional Chinese medicine – that is, say acupuncture treatments, traditional herbal medicine and the practice of Qigong.
“I am ready to die,” he wrote in a last message to his relatives. “I feel that I have done most of the projects that were close to my heart. I had more to come, but, lo, life decided otherwise. ”
Curious and energetic information entrepreneur, Mr. Lamontagne was the co-founder in 1977 of a magazine entitled Crazy Time, body of social, cultural, feminist and political reflection. Then, wishing to give significant media space to alternative health approaches as well as spiritual approaches, he created the “alternative” magazine Resource Guide in 1984.
He succeeds in making Resource Guide the benchmark tool announced by its name. There are subjects that the mainstream media will address 5 or 10 years later: ecological habitat, yoga, support for the dying, mindfulness meditation, farmer’s baskets, massage therapy, non-toxic paint, organic wine, light therapy, midwives in the environment. hospital, melatonin, raw food …
In 1996, inspired by new technologies, he left the Resource Guide to found an electronic media, Réseau Proteus, which will soon become PasseportSante.net, the information hub on alternative and complementary health approaches and the most important French-speaking site on health, consulted in Europe and Africa as well as in North America.
Christian Lamontagne left PasseportSante.net in 2010 and continued his social and cultural analyzes in two blogs (The state of play and Sutton’s Notes, which are still online) as well as in an essay published under the title Responsibility, freedom and creation of the world (Liber, 2010). His latest book, Nation and secularism, appeared by the same publisher in January 2013.
A committed citizen and sincere intellectual, Christian Lamontagne is a prominent figure in “social” journalism. Thanks to the documented and rigorous information that he has always promoted, he has played a leading role in the recognition of alternative health approaches and in the respect that many of them now enjoy.
Source: Lucie Dumoulin
Journalist and former editor at PasseportSante.net
