Stan Goldberg | Lessons for the Living

November 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the author of a wonderful book called ‘Lessons for the Living.’ It’s a very beautiful note that we can end the show on today. The author of this book is Stan Goldberg, and the subtitle is, ‘Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude and Courage at the End of Life.’ Welcome to the show, Stan Goldberg.

Stan Goldberg: Thanks, Kent, for having me on.

Dr. Kent: You went through a terrible experience yourself, and that’s how you got into this whole thing.

Stan Goldberg: Yes. I have prostate cancer, and when I contracted that, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know what the prognosis was. Through a series of events, I ended up as a bedside hospice volunteer.

Dr. Kent: Your background is as a professor, and of course you have your PhD in speech pathology, and all sorts of history teaching and presenting and all of that. Now how is this different from all of that?

Stan Goldberg: I think that the biggest difference is that in a world of academia, you tend to be very objective, very empirical, very data oriented, very almost constricted in some way. Being a bedside hospice volunteer, you have to throw all of that out, and it’s a very emotional, present experience. It was a radical transformation that I had to go through in order to be effective as a bedside hospice volunteer.

Dr. Kent: The book itself is obviously dealing with both you and them. How did you learn through these experiences of talking to these people?

Stan Goldberg: When I started to do my volunteer work, I really had no intention of writing this book. I was actually working on a novel. The experiences were so transforming that I thought that I really needed to write these things down. What happened was, I went from someone who pretty much fit the stereotypical view of a university professor to someone who was much more open, not only about what I was experiencing going through cancer, but also what my patients were experiencing. Being in their presence really allowed me to get much more in touch with myself, and pretty much learn how to live regardless of how long that might be.

Dr. Kent: All of us, from early on in life, have real problems thinking about death: of course we do. It’s a terrifying thing. You confronted it by being diagnosed first of all. It’s obviously a different perspective when it happens to you or when you see it happen to someone else. What did you see in seeing through the window, both directions?

Stan Goldberg: I think that there’s really three levels of understanding that I found. The first is what I had been most accustomed to, which was book [indecipherable]: essentially you can read about something and have an intellectual understanding of that. The second thing is you can actually watch it happen, and that would be at the bedside, and you’re seeing people confront their own deaths. The third most intimate, I think probably most genuine form of knowledge, is when you experience the thing yourself. I’ve been able to do all three of those things now.

Dr. Kent: There are such taboos around death. You shouldn’t talk too much about it, and nobody prepares you for those times when your family members are in the hospital, or when you yourself are diagnosed with something. What stories did you come across that made you write this book?

Stan Goldberg: There were many things I learned. If you look at the book, there’s about eight very specific lessons. They all seem to have very simple descriptions, such as letting go, not taking along with you something that no longer is functional. An example of that would be there was a woman that I served whose mother had difficulty accepting the idea that her daughter was dying. Because she couldn’t accept that, the daughter made a conscious decision to keep on living in spite of tremendous pain she was experiencing. Watching that happen, it made me realize that I was doing the same thing on some levels, even though it wasn’t that traumatic. Because of my cancer, I was putting myself in physical risk, because I did a lot of outdoor things alone, that didn’t make sense any longer. So that was one direct application, where watching what my patient was going through was a direct lesson to how I needed to change my own life.

Dr. Kent: So you have prostate cancer, which is something that is terrifying to a lot of men, and yet men rarely get checked for it, honestly. What can you say about the cancer itself?

Stan Goldberg: Get it checked quick, and soon and often. Prostate cancer is one of the slowest growing forms of cancer. If it’s caught early enough, while the cancer is still in the prostate gland, it’s a hundred percent curable almost. But once it’s allowed to get out of that gland, which has been the case with me, then those microscopic cells are going to be there forever. When I said that my diagnosis is indeterminate, what I really meant was that the cells are always there, and it’s a holding action that medication is taking essentially. My thought is that the cancer cells will always be there, they will be hungry, and they’ll be ready and waiting to go, unless something else beats them to the punch.

Dr. Kent: It’s fascinating to me to speak to someone who does have a close perspective on that: all of this healthcare debate is going on right now. Obviously one thing is Americans are thinking a lot more about health over the last several months, but what’s your take on the whole debate happening?

Stan Goldberg: One of the biggest problems that I saw was that you had people who had a vested interest in keeping the healthcare system exactly as it is scaring the most vulnerable people in our society, those that were sick and elderly. It’s taken the hospice movement numbers of years in order to have the whole issue of looking at end of life care as something that was important. I think a lot of the discussion on death panels, on pulling the plug, really put us back many years. I was very disheartened by what was happening.

Dr. Kent: Because it’s a political tactic on an issue that really all of these, even the people that were saying those phrases, advocated planning, which is the strange thing. So there’s this political thing happening for something that we really do need.

Stan Goldberg: I agree with you completely.

Dr. Kent: In terms of this book, what’s the been the feedback? Obviously there’s not many folks out there that are able to put this perspective to death. Of course the book is called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ It’s not about how to die or something like that. What’s been the feedback, because clearly you do offer perspective that is new?

Stan Goldberg: It’s interesting. I think there’s two levels of feedback that I’ve been getting. The first one is a reluctance to read it because people have a natural fear of dying. They look at death as the finality of it, the horror of it, and whatever negative term they can think of for it. But when they actually read the book, the feedback is incredibly gratifying. I think the purpose of the book was to have people understand that the greatest teacher we can have about living really is death. A willingness to look at it openly and see what it can teach us is what I try to give people in the book.

Dr. Kent: What does this book mean to you in terms of what you’ve been able to do with it, and what it means now for you moving forward?

Stan Goldberg: There’s two different forms of satisfaction from this book. The one is in writing it, essentially I felt that I was given information and knowledge that I felt I was required to share. As I said, I had no intention of writing the book, but the message was so clear and so important, I thought I was obligated to share it. Now I’ve done that, and that was one of the purposes. The second is being in the presence of these people has radically transformed my life. For me, it’s more important that the quality of the life that I have not just physically, but also psychologically, than it is the quantity of life that I have left. That I got from my patients.

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful book it is. Give us another peak inside the cover. Tell us another one of the sections in the book.

Stan Goldberg: There was a woman who had spent her life waiting for a person that she had a relationship with to get out of jail, which was a very strange relationship they had. As he had about a few more years left, she contracted brain cancer. She realized that by waiting her entire life for this guy, she had wasted hers. At that point, when he would finally able to be released from prison, her life would long have been over. She came to understand that living in the future is a way of denying the present. That was a lesson that I took very seriously. That’s the lesson that a lot of the patients that I was with came to understand: we don’t know about tomorrow, we don’t know about the future. The past is gone, all we have is today. Live for today because that’s the only time we exist in.

Dr. Kent: Those are beautiful words. What’s the immediate job that you do? Tell us more, because I know from my time with family in the hospital, there’s some incredible workers that work with people. What is the work you do? Do you work at a hospital? Do you go to homes?

Stan Goldberg: I’ve been with four different hospices. Hospice can take place in a dedicated unit, it can take place within a hospital, it can also take place in homes. I’m currently with Pathways Home Healthcare and Hospice, and they almost completely go into people’s homes. So I will go into someone’s home, I will sit with them, I will talk with them. If something needs to be taken care of in the house, I will do that. But it’s usually that I’m there to – the best way to describe it is a midwife to death. I’m there just to listen to them, to be there to witness their pain, to talk to them about dying if they bring up the subject. It’s almost what you would do with a family member or a good friend, and that’s what a hospice volunteer does.

Dr. Kent: That’s also such an incredible opportunity to sit at someone’s bedside, because they recant the tales of their entire life at times, I’m sure.

Stan Goldberg: It’s an honor to be able to sit there and be invited into someone’s life, especially as it’s getting closer to ending. People are more honest with you than they are sometimes with their family members. They’re willing to share with you things that they’ve never told anybody. You walk away from the bedside of these people, a different person, a better person, every time you’re there.

Dr. Kent: On a lighter note, your latest blog entry talks about people who died in the middle ages. I’ve got to say I was chuckling – death is at sometimes sort of funny in a weird way. You talked about when people died, they said goodbye, gave away the furniture, and then they just stopped breathing.

Stan Goldberg: Yes, and that was pretty much how it was. At that point, death was viewed as just a part of living. As a part of living, it was treated no differently than birth. So it was this continual wheel that people accepted and they didn’t have any fear about. Now, it’s a very fearful topic. I don’t know if I mentioned that blog, but there was a story that Thomas Merton told that when his mother, Donna, was dying – this was about 1910 or 1913 – they wouldn’t allow him to come to the hospital, because they thought it would traumatize him, although he loved his mother and she loved him. What she did was to write him a letter that he was able to read after she died. It’s that kind of fear we have of death. I think it ends up doing two evils: one, it makes it difficult for those of us who survive people who have died to really understand what is going on and to learn from them, and the second, it makes it difficult for the person who’s dying. It’s important to say goodbye. It’s important to finish up things. There’s a lot of things that we can do for loved ones as they are dying if we just weren’t so afraid of the topic.

Dr. Kent: You know what’s interesting too, I was just thinking Halloween weekend is approaching, and it used to be that Halloween was a scary night because the souls of friends and family and other folks were just drifting about before All Saints’ Day. It’s kind of kids paint cemeteries, and they dress up as dead people and this and that, but it made me think, it’s all become so commercialized, that the kids aren’t actually thinking about death anymore. They’re just having a good time. I’ve heard that many cultures, even American culture 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it was much more talked about, death. There was always an open casket, and the whole town would come see. What’s the relationship that we have now adays with death?

Stan Goldberg: I think we fear it generally. We think that if we ignore it, it will go away. I think it also allows us to think in terms of the future rather than living for today. I’ll always have time to say I’m sorry. I’ll have time to say goodbye. I’ll have time to hundreds of different things, and I think in some way it insulates us from maybe some of the more difficult things that we currently experience. Like, if I screw up, I tell people now I’m sorry right away. I don’t wait, because I don’t know how much longer I have. I think it’s that insulation that people want. They would prefer to think that there’s always time to do it. If you believe you always have time to do it, then you’re not going to want to deal with death.

Dr. Kent: These lessons for the living, it’s almost that you’re telling people, there are things that we should be thankful for, and things you should apologize for right away. Is there some of that to what your book is about?

Stan Goldberg: That’s the whole book. The nut of the book is that the way that we live is going to be the way we die. If you live in the present, you take care of people. You say you’re sorry when you’ve done something that you shouldn’t have. You tell people how much you love them. If you do all of that now, and don’t think you have time for the future to do that, I’ve found that deaths tend to be much easier.

Dr. Kent: Yes. It’s so fascinating talking with you. What are you working on now? Obviously you’re doing some interviews, and giving this wonderful book out there, but what are you doing now?

Stan Goldberg: There’s another book I’m working on, don’t know the title yet, but it has to do with resurrecting one’s joy. One of the things that I’ve seen is that a lot of times, people will grieve a loss they have, whether it’s a loss for a person, a pet, a job, and many other things, and the question then becomes, how do you regain that joy that you lost? The approach most people take is, well, you look for an exact substitute. If your husband dies, you look for a new husband, if your pet dies, you look for another pet. What I started looking at is those people that I’ve seen who’ve recovered their joy did it not necessarily by looking for an exact duplicate, but rather, looking at the emotion.

Dr. Kent: I don’t know if you ever heard – where did I see this? On television or somewhere, the story of the couple that cloned their dog or their pig or something.

Stan Goldberg: No, I didn’t.

Dr. Kent: It was their beloved – was it a pig? I can’t remember – but their beloved animal, and they cloned it. Of course, the animal that they literally reproduced wasn’t the same animal. Exactly what you were just saying. It’s such an honor to chat with you, Dr. Stan Goldberg. Now your background is in communicative disorders at San Francisco State, and you’ve got political theory background, and philosophy.

Stan Goldberg: As my mother would say, I could never make up my mind.

Dr. Kent: Yes [laughs]. Exactly. Now you’re a writer in a topic that’s very important. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next, and this is truly a beautiful book. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Stan Goldberg: Thank you for having me on Kent.

Dr. Kent: People can check out Stan Goldberg’s newest book, and his blog: great amounts of information on StanGoldbergWriter.com. Of course his book is called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ What incredible stories he’s told us even here, and go check it out. Next week on the show, I’m excited because we’re going to have a whole different lineup of guests. Every week, it’s kind of a different thing. I believe next week, we’ve got an author for most of the show, and then a musician at the end. Every day this week at 3pm, you can tune in and listen to Sound Authors interviews. I hope you’re all able to pick up a great book: Stan Goldberg’s book is a book that you need to buy for everyone in your family who has ever dealt with death or thought about it. It’s called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ Clarke Buehling – what a fun conversation that was – talking about The SkirtLifters, his music of the last 20 years, his explorations of the last 40 with the banjo, and the origins of urban and country music, and of White and Black music. It’s been a great show today. Everyone have a safe week, and we’ll talk to you live again next Friday. Tune in every day at 3pm to hear some favorites of mine from Sound Authors radio. Have a safe week, and pick up a great book.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, Inspiration, Medicine, Motivation, PODCAST, Spirituality

Stan Goldberg | Lessons for the Living

November 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Stan Goldberg [22:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Stan Goldberg is a Professor Emeritus of Communicative Disorders at San Francisco State University with a Ph.D. in Speech Pathology, a Masters in Political Theory, and a Bachelors in Philosophy. For over 25 years he taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the area of learning problems and change. Dr. Goldberg has published six books, written numerous articles and delivered over 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America and Asia. His latest book is ‘Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life.’ In 2009 he was named by the Hospice Volunteer Association as ‘Volunteer of the Year.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, Inspiration, Medicine, Motivation, PODCAST, Spirituality

Rory Freedman | Skinny Bitch

October 31, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Well it’s my real pleasure to have on the show next the award winning author of ‘Skinny Bitch,’ Rory Freedman. It’s a fantastic book, beautiful cover, and it’s selling off the shelves. Now there’s a whole line of products attached to it, including ‘Skinny Bastard.’ I wish I still was one. Welcome to the show, Rory Freedman.

Rory Freedman: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Dr. Kent: What an incredible concept. How did you start coming up with this book title, and the things inside it.

Rory Freedman: The title was just a provocative, cheap, attention-getting ploy. Basically I changed the way that I eat, and changed my life, and I wanted to make sure to share that information with other people, and get that information out there. But I also know that people don’t necessarily want to sit down and learn about their health, and learn about their food origins and learn about what’s going on with their bodies with the food they’re eating, so I figured that if we made a fun, sassy, easy-to-read guide, and put it with a silly title, and good artwork, then people would dig it.

Dr. Kent: The title, it is silly, but it’s so edgy. It’s got the thing that every woman wants to be, and the thing that every woman doesn’t want to be.

Rory Freedman: Yes. Unfortunately, nobody cares about their health in this day and age. We’re in a time of mass media and pop culture, and everybody just wants to be thin, and ‘bitch’ seems to get a lot of attention. The title’s been a great attention-getting ploy, and I’m happy that people are reading the book because there is so much sound information and compelling, motivating stuff that gets people to really make those lasting changes once and for all.

Dr. Kent: One great thing about the book – and the title and the cover hint at it – is that it really is a no-nonsense guide. It’s edgy. The way the book is written, the way you’re advice is given is very edgy. What’s the feedback you get from women?

Rory Freedman: Basically they read the book, and they laugh their asses off the whole time they’re reading it, and because of that, the information sort of sticks. I’m not a scholar, I’m not a real writer in a sense – this was the first book I ever wrote, and I just write in a really conversational way. It’s not a stiff, boring, hard-to-read diet book: it’s more of a fun lifestyle book, but there’s again, tons of information in there that is just easier to swallow when it’s written in a really informal way.

Dr. Kent: Both of you got to know each other in the modeling world, right?

Rory Freedman: Right. I was an agent, and Kim was a model, and we bonded over food and laughing. We found that we had similar senses of humor, and we both liked eating more than anything else on the planet. That was, I don’t know how many years ago, but we became fast friends, and then eventually when we each changed our own crappy diets to a better diet, that’s eventually when we started to think that we could make a difference in the lives of other people and how we could best go about doing that.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the crappy diet first. I am definitely attracted to that concept.

Rory Freedman: You name it, I ate it. Basically, I used to eat Burger King seven days a week.

Dr. Kent: Seven days!

Rory Freedman: Yup – seven days a week. Actually, maybe it was five days a week. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say seven. It was probably five days a week. Every morning I used to eat a Taylor ham-fried egg-and-cheese on a roll, and I drank soda, and chocolate bars, and bags of chips, and anything from a convenience store, I was interested in eating.

Dr. Kent: Well, you got my mouth watering. So tell me how health food can make me just as excited.

Rory Freedman: It can’t overnight. If you’d told me back then that I was going to get excited over eating something healthy like a salad or steamed vegetables and fruit, I would have barfed on the table. But, once you do start making small changes, something happens inside your brain and inside your body, something shifts and it doesn’t happen overnight, but eventually it does happen, and once it happens, you cannot believe the changes that you experience: your taste buds, your brain, your personality, your positivity, your energy: everything in your body of course just becomes different and better, and it’s life-altering.

Dr. Kent: So there’s a lot of folks out there that say, okay, we’ve seen them on these big shows, or we see them on the shelves of all the stores, and they look skinny, the woman on the front cover of their book is skinny. Of course it’s easy for them.

Rory Freedman: Not at all. Food is an addiction for all of us. Even now, even being skinny and even being healthy, I still struggle with food, because I love eating more than anything on the planet. I actually just had to take a vow to not eat sugar for 30 days because I was feeling like I’ve gotta get this under control: all I want is cookies, all day every day. I’m not even PMSing! So I’ve gotta figure this out. I just took a 30-day pledge to myself, and actually I think it’ll be longer than 30 days: I’m not going to eat any sugar until Thanksgiving.

Dr. Kent: Holy cow!

Rory Freedman: I know! It’s a big deal. So if people think that it doesn’t matter, if you’re thin, or if you’re overweight: food is hard for all of us, and making changes is really difficult, but once you make that commitment to yourself – and I think a really good idea for people to do is to just say for 30 days, I’m going to try something. Don’t worry about the rest of your life. Don’t say from now on I’m going to bla bla bla. Just pick something you know you can do better, start today, and do it for 30 days.

Dr. Kent: So I’m curious about ‘Skinny Bastard,’ a little bit. That’s the newest fun book in the series. What inspired that, and how was it writing that one?

Rory Freedman: It was a lot of fun to write that one, because I got to come up with as many euphemisms as I could for the male operating equipment. That book was basically the same as ‘Skinny Bitch,’ because men and women have mostly the same dietary needs, the only difference being that men often have a higher calorie need, but basically the same foods are healthy for all of us, and people have the same concerns. Of course with men we talked a little bit more about exercise, and athletes, and protein and weight-lifting, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction, and how your diet effects all of those things. It also was fun to kind of – even for me, because I’m already bawdy to begin with – but to step out and be a little bawdier, and doing a little locker-room talk. It was fun.

Dr. Kent: It’s an incredible thing to see a book that’s on the bestseller list. It’s literally, you walk into Borders, there it is, all around the country. It’s a book that’s really edgy. It doesn’t have the things you’re supposed to say in it. It is bawdy, it is edgy, it’s fun. Have you gotten any people saying to you, ‘Hey, this is a little bit over the top’?

Rory Freedman: Oh, of course! I certainly didn’t set out to offend anyone; I just have my own specific sense of humor, and I think a lot of that stuff is hilarious. The feedback in general has been in agreement with that, that it’s hilarious. But if you’re somebody who’s easily offended by four-letter words, or somebody calling your johnson a ding-a-ling-ling, then don’t read the book! You’re going to be horrified because there’s ten-times worse stuff in there than that. But if you have a good sense of humor, and you want to feel good, and you want to eat well, and you want an education that doesn’t feel like an education, then you’re going to love it, and you’re going to laugh out loud multiple times, I guarantee it.

Dr. Kent: Diet books, gosh, they’re a dime a dozen. There’s so many, and everybody’s hooked to them, and they buy one after the other after the other. The hush-hush industry thing is we know it’s not going to work, but we’re just trying to find the next edgy concept that everybody will flock to, whether it’s Atkins diet or this and that. Your book is a little different, because it’s kind of timeless. You’re dealing with women personally, but have they actually lost the weight? Have you gotten some feedback?

Rory Freedman: The reason that this book is popular – certainly Posh Spice picking up the book and being photographed holding it absolutely made a difference for us – but the book was really successful before that ever happened, and before we had any publicity at all, and that’s because people were reading the book, and it was a huge word of mouth success. People read the book and then tell the friends and family around them, ‘You have to read this book.’ Because their minds are blown when they read it. There’s just so much compelling information, and it’s also a really fun read. But it does change people’s lives, and the way the information is presented makes it for the first time easy for people to actually make these changes. I’m not tooting my own horn, I’m just saying, the book is effective. It’s not like we have reinvented the wheel. I didn’t invent this way of eating. I just collected information from all sorts of scientific sources and put it in one easy-to-read, fun package. People are responding to it.

Dr. Kent: If you were to boil down what changes are needed to become what you’ve become, which is somebody who’s in control of their own body. What would it boil down to for you?

Rory Freedman: I think that everybody knows what their weak spots are. Some people have no idea what their weak spots are because they just don’t know what’s healthy and what’s not, so this books is going to give a good education on that. For other people, they just need the motivation. They know what their weak spots are but they don’t really feel excited or compelled or motivated to do anything about it. I think that’s one of the really good things about the book: when you’re done, you’re excited, and invigorated. Instead of dreading making the change, you kind of feel like ‘Wow! If I don’t do this…’ For example, I’ll start with a little silly one: soda. I know a lot of people drink soda, whether it’s diet or regular soda, and there’s nothing in there that’s beneficial for your body at all, and in fact it’s harmful for your body. So for people that can get rid of the soda and have water instead, it’s going to make a huge difference. Not only just because of that, but because it’s also going to influence other things in your diet, and your health as well. So just start somewhere, do something.

Dr. Kent: So what about celery, are we going to have to eat a lot of celery on the ‘Skinny Bitch,’ or ‘Skinny Bastard’?

Rory Freedman: I don’t think we mention the word ‘celery’ in the book ever. I’m definitely not someone who sits down to chop carrot sticks, and chop celery sticks. I’d rather eat a pile of poop; how boring! There’s lots of fun food that you can eat on the ‘Skinny Bitch’ and ‘Skinny Bastard’ diets. That’s the reason they also work. We’re not saying, ‘No more cake! No more cookies!’ We’re saying, food is meant to be enjoyed and nobody likes eating more than us. Just figure out what you’re eating, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel crappy. Make better choices for the food that you are buying, but still enjoy the same stuff.

Dr. Kent: Now you also have, ‘Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.’

Rory Freedman: Right, that’s a cookbook, it’s a recipe book. For some people, this is a new way of eating, and we wanted to make it as easy as we could as possible, and there’s a cookbook that’s got tons of fun, great recipes.

Dr. Kent: I have to say, my fiancé is really into Larabars, and it looks like you guys are too.

Rory Freedman: Yes, I love Larabars. There’s a lot of those protein bars or snack bars out there, and a lot of them are just kind of crappy for you, but people think that because it’s called like a nature bar or a nutrition bar that it’s healthy. But if you read the ingredients, there’s sugar or corn syrup, or God forbid, artificial flavors or colors, and it’s like, who the hell wants to eat that? The ingredients in Larabars are just really pure and really simple. It’s always just a few ingredients and they taste really good.

Dr. Kent: So what are you working on now? There must be another three or four books in the hopper, right?

Rory Freedman: Oh, yeah. I’m just cranking them out. We actually have a boxed set coming out in December or January. It’s a couple in a box. It’s the hardcover editions of ‘Skinny Bitch’ and ‘Skinny Bastard.’ A boxed set so that if there’s a man and woman living together, and they both want to get their groove on, that’s a good little gift option there.

Dr. Kent: Of course, the funny thing about the book industry is often times a lot of the men’s books are bought by women. That’s a big market.

Rory Freedman: That’s definitely something that happens all the time. I think men aren’t known to be trolling the diet book section of bookstores, but I think women, because just in general we tend to be naggy, we tend to fix things, we’re definitely the type of creatures that will buy a book for our man.

Dr. Kent: I bought your book for the first time, actually, for a client because your title is so edgy, and your style is so fantastic in the book. I use it with my clients, and recommend it to all of them. So I was in the bookstore buying a copy, and I’ve got to say, I was turning a bright shade of red. I sandwiched it between another few books.

Rory Freedman: It takes a certain kind of man to have enough confidence to hold a book called, ‘Skinny Bitch,’ whether it’s on the subway or in an airplane. I know a couple of women who want their men to read the books, but they say, ‘He won’t read it! He doesn’t want to read it!’ I would just say ‘Leave it in the bathroom. It’ll get picked up.’

Dr. Kent: Exactly. That’s the place men read. Exactly. All right, it’s been such an honor talking to you. Tell me where we can find out more. Of course, there’s the Bitch List, and there’s SkinnyBitch.net, and all sorts of places.

Rory Freedman: Right. We’ve got SkinnyBitch.net and SkinnyBastard.net, and all the bookstores and Amazon and Barnes & Noble: we’re everywhere. I want to thank you for having me. It’s been my honor and privilege to be here.

Dr. Kent: Oh sure. You’re book rocks. Are you going to stick with the Skinny Bitch thing, and when you’re 80 you’ll still be a skinny bitch?

Rory Freedman: We’ll see how it goes. A little of this, a little of that; we’ll see how it goes.

Dr. Kent: Awesome. It’s been such an honor. I’ve been talking to the coauthor of ‘Skinny Bitch.’ What a fun book, fun title, and really practical. Rory Freedman, thank you so much.

Rory Freedman: Thank you so much.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, Food, Health, Motivation, TRANSCRIPTS

Rory Freedman | Skinny Bitch

October 31, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Rory Freedman [14:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Her Website:

Rory Freedman co-authored the L.A. Times Best Seller, ‘Skinny Bitch.’ She is a former agent for Ford Models and has studied diet, health, traditional, and holistic nutrition for more than ten years. She lives in Los Angeles and has successfully counseled models, actors, athletes, and other professionals using the Skinny Bitch method. The following is Rory’s and co-author, Kim Barnouin’s, philosophy about ‘Skinny Bitch:’ Don’t judge a book by its cover. We titled the book, ‘Skinny Bitch,’ for one reason: So people would read it. Sadly, people seem to be more interested in their appearances these days than their health. But neither one of us puts any stock in being skinny. We care about being healthy and want to inspire people to take better care of themselves. We’ve all been so brainwashed by fad diets, magazine articles, and advertising that we have forgotten how to think for ourselves. With obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and depression at all-time highs, it’s time for us to smarten up and use our own heads. ‘Skinny Bitch’ is not a diet. It’s a way of life. A way to enjoy food. A way to feel healthy, clean, energized and pure. It’s time to reclaim our minds and bodies!

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, Food, Health, Inspiration, Motivation, PODCAST

Dr. D.A. Henderson | Smallpox: The Death of a Disease

October 30, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest on the show is Dr. D.A. Henderson. He’s the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ This book is an account of challenges, obstacles and disasters faced by an intrepid international program in achieving the global eradication of smallpox. Fascinating, fascinating tale. Welcome to the show, Dr. D.A. Henderson.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Delighted to be with you.

Dr. Kent: Give me a little background about it. What is smallpox?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Smallpox was probably the most devastating disease known to history. It goes back at least 3500 years, and has caused tens of millions of deaths, hundreds of millions of deaths, over the century. It’s a virus disease: it causes a severe rash, a high fever. The person who acquires it has about a 30 percent chance of dying from the disease, and some of those who recover are left blind. Throughout history, it was regarded as probably the most feared out of all the diseases: it’s worse than cholera or yellow fever, or any of the other diseases.

Dr. Kent: My goodness. How was it part of Americans’ lives early this century?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It certainly kept going throughout the US until 1949; that was when our last cases occurred. One of the remarkable things is that the American Indians, the natives here in this country and throughout the western hemisphere, were particularly susceptible to it. So death rates of 60 to 80 percent were recorded. In fact, they recorded the fact that so many people died, that they couldn’t harvest the food to keep going, and whole tribes disappeared.

Dr. Kent: Wow. The toll just during the 20th century, according to your bio, says that there were 300 to 500 million deaths.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: That’s a fairly conservative estimate. Before the disease was eradicated (the last case occurred in 1977), we estimated that there were at least 300 million deaths. One compares that to what the New York Times has said how many people died as a result directly or indirectly of our conflicts in the 20th century, they estimate about 120 million, so it was more than two and half times that number dying as a result of smallpox in various countries throughout the world.

Dr. Kent: There’s such a hubbub around vaccines these days. Celebrities are starting not to vaccinate their children. This buzz is starting. With a father who’s a physician, he always tells me it’s foolish not to vaccinate, and part of the reason is because there’s such power in vaccines, and of course, with smallpox, my goodness, of course 500 million deaths, that’s a huge number that can be prevented by a vaccine. So tell me about the vaccine: how it works, how you started to think about coming up with it, or how the whole community did.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: The smallpox vaccine is actually largely comprised of another virus called cowpox, which did infect cows. It’s sort of a cousin of smallpox. It started very early that they found they could inoculate this material into the arm, and there would be an infection: a little pustule would form. The individual would then develop protective antibodies, antibodies in the blood, so that when the individual is exposed to smallpox, the antibodies would fight off the infection. This is the way vaccines work. Some of them, what they call ‘kill’ vaccines, you take a virus, like influenza, and you grow up a certain quantity of it, and you kill that virus and actually you inoculate it into the skin, and that really is your vaccine. Your body makes protective antibodies against that virus, which is dead – it’s growing – and when you are then exposed to the live virus, those antibodies are fighting off the invasion of the live virus.

Dr. Kent: Wow. How do you eradicate, even using something as incredible as this vaccination, how do you eradicate a disease? How can you get every single case?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: In fact, we did not try to get every single case. What we tried to do was provide a vaccine protection to let’s say 80 percent of the population. Now smallpox cannot infect animals, and it cannot just lie in the soil and infect people. So therefore, that virus, to keep going, it has to infect one person after another. One after the other. Think of it as a chain of infection. Now if we can stop that virus from infecting one person, and one person from infecting another, we then can break that chain and gradually get rid of the disease. So what we did was try to first of all protect a lot of people, by vaccination, and then we did something that’s called surveillance and containment: basically, find the cases. Once you’ve found a case, a team would go out and they’d vaccinate, in Africa for example, 30 houses around where the case was, all of the people there. Those people would then be protected. Then the patient could not spread the disease to anybody else. The chain would be broken, and little by little, you’d stop the spread of smallpox throughout the area.

Dr. Kent: Fascinating. Is that a technique that has been used before?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Yes, it actually goes back a long time. Our first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, goes back to 1796, and this was the discovery that you could take cowpox, or a little infection off of a cow and protect an individual person with that. So it had been used off and on, although it had been used pretty much on, until the time of eradication. But it was impossible really to get that vaccine out to distant areas, so that it wasn’t destroyed by feat, then to get it properly inserted in the skin so that it would really grow, and to do this throughout a lot of parts of the world which are very remote, and which are virtually inaccessible. So, it left places, areas and people where the smallpox could keep going and did keep going.

Dr. Kent: Wow. What other diseases could potentially be eradicated completely? There’s so many out there in the world, is it possible to eliminate some of these, and are efforts going on?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It’s pretty hard to get rid of a lot of diseases. A number of them, like tuberculosis, an individual gets infected, and they get perhaps temporarily cured, but they’re still carrying the organism and can still transmit it. Poliomyelitis, for example, the individual spreads the disease, but you can’t tell where it is, because only one person in about 200 will get paralyzed, and the others will be infected, but there will be no symptoms, so that makes it difficult. There are some organisms that really largely exist in animals, and so we only get in contact with them periodically, like rabies: people know about that in dogs, and man does not get infected very often. So there are a lot of diseases that we cannot eradicate. Smallpox, fortunately, having been the most disastrous of all the diseases, had this weakness that it did not infect animals, and individuals, when they recovered from the disease, if they did, they were protected: they’d never get another case for the rest of their lives. So this was what we took advantage of with smallpox, and then tried to eradicate it.

Dr. Kent: Smallpox was essentially destroyed, but you talk about that there are stockpiles of this disease in certain places, and that could potentially be used as a weapon.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It’s a worry. We do know that back in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, that the Soviet Union was working with smallpox. It was the preferred agent that they would use if they were going to use a biological weapon. So, this was a concern. When we got our last case, which actually occurred October 26, 1977, we then wrote to laboratories, contacted people all over the world who might still have some virus of smallpox. They were asked to destroy these; governments were asked to check their laboratories and to destroy them, or to transfer them to one of two laboratories which had been research laboratories that were working with us: one being actually in Moscow, one being in Atlanta, Georgia. After a while, all of the laboratories insisted finally that they had destroyed the virus or transferred it. It left us just the two places that we knew had the smallpox virus. Since then, there’s been continuing discussion as to whether those should be destroyed or not. This has been studied by many experts and scientists. I think most believe that it would be a good idea, let’s just destroy it. There’s some who believe that we might be able to learn something by retaining it, keeping it, and working with it, but there’s always a risk in that. The question is: are you going to risk having it escape, for example, or are you going to destroy it? This is something that is being discussed in the World Health Assembly and the World Health Organization: trying to reach a decision on this.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor talking to Dr. D.A. Henderson. He’s the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ It’s so riveting thinking about all of this. I appreciate you being on the show, and I hope to talk to you again.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Thank you very much; nice to be with you.

Dr. Kent: Again, you can find that book all over the place. It’s called, ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease,’ by Dr. D.A. Henderson.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, History, Medicine, PODCAST, Science, TRANSCRIPTS