Pecking new ground on the social media farm

The Screaming Lady started off as a sort of private water cooler where I’d go with the ladies in the novel I am writing to take a work break. It was part of a deal my husband/editor/compass requested if I was to leave my communications consultancy and enter a two-year (he thought one) hermitage, knowing where the media world was headed and why I needed to keep in touch with it. Blogging was fits and starts of mostly ramblings on nature, travel, kids and served as a kind of reverse thermometer for the novel’s progress. That is, the more my three or four readers got from the blog, the less the novel was getting out of me. Extrapolate that to dabblings in Facebook and a community network I created, a few blogs whipped up for friends and family, video projects that made it all so much more fun, Flickr, Picassa, and LinkedIN, and well, you get it. Then, last February, when economic forces forced me out of creative self-indulgence, Screaming Lady the blog swapped sweat pants for slacks and set about morphing into a portfolio of health care writing. She quickly joined Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN accounts where all the other communications strategists already were social marketing away to their social networks in the social media space.

Screaming Lady has evolved again as the buds of business have begun to break, her boots are getting muddy, and tilling the social media soil calls for a more rugged pair of work pants. The metaphor trail intentionally veers to farming references here for a reason: At the beginning of 2010, the Lady begins a year-long social media science experiment taking a small pastured egg and chicken farm in Solano County, California, into marketing orbit. Soul Food Farms and I are working in trade: owner farmer Alexis Koefoed can begin marketing her pastured eggs and chickens, her community service agriculture program (CSA), and cooking school, and I get to tame the social media dervish to a local scale, where the analytics point directly to the communications efforts, and we can draw some straightforward ROI from it. Together with a few colleagues, advisers, and social media gurus (including aforementioned compass), we’ll start with the bare essentials, move to some simple basics, and expand to more creative tools and techniques. We’ll seek advice, try some moves, switch gears if they don’t work – all in a very public blog (a temporary detour from ScreamingLady) that will expose the challenges and test the promises we have all come to know as the holy grail of new media marketing.

We also hope to get some fresh and tasty eggs and chicken out of the deal.

First, Do No Spin

When people talk about communications strategy or public relations, "spin" is a cheeky term many like to use to describe a handily-worded defense strategy. And they are correct on occasion. Thankfully, ninety nine percent of illuminating conversations don't cover the topic of public relations, so when the word "spin" comes into one, it's usually the ill-advised celebrity version often employed in high stakes crisis communications. Like when Wall Street banks are vilified for multi-million dollar bonuses during the economic wreckage and ruin of businesses, communities, and families. When sports heroes' mug shots are plastered across TV screens during news coverage of domestic violence cases. When quietly composed, ashen-faced wives conspire at the confessional stanchion to exonerate their philandering politician husbands.

The rest of the time, communications, messaging, and public relations is comparatively mundane: help companies identify and understand their target audience and articulate their product or service in terms that matter to said audience (sometimes contrary to what organizations think). To those of us in "the business," it's cool. But to businesses that count on us, it's like taking vitamins: good for them, but better taken once a day, trusting the benefits are quietly at work in the background.

When Graham Bowley, in a New York Times article on Wall Street spin, served up five pieces of low-spin, relatively folksy advise to Wall Street on the verge of reporting profits on track to exceed those at the height of the credit bubble, a lot of us flaks were grateful that for once a true picture of "the real communications department" came through. That is, most of the time, we simply recommend you use plain talk, speak the truth, and do good. No, seriously.

So, when the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, an independent health care agency highly respected for its dissociation from deep pockets and politics, neglected to explain to millions of alarmed women, doctors, and advocacy groups why they suddenly reversed breast cancer screening guidelines that kept most women feeling, well, safe from harm, we wish they'd read Bowley's piece first. Not that they tried to manipulate anyone nor that their findings were in any way disingenuous. They just didn't seem to think people would need more than a quick announcement. Curiously, women, doctors, and advocacy groups blasted the alarms, but by the time the USPSTF rushed to the talk shows to defend what turned out to be some well-researched, well-founded guidelines, the damage was done.

A cautionary tale is delivered by hindsight, so to put a spin on another profession's oath to place a priority on the client's best interests, we offer the following advice that Bowley quotes from Richard Edelman, a New York public relations executive:

"Show you create real products that benefit people.

. . . one of the best things Wall Street could do now is clearly “explain how you make your money and why your business model makes sense for a stakeholder society.”

If they can demonstrate in vivid terms the real role they play in the economy — by helping companies borrow money to grow and create jobs, for example — they might also justify their profits and pay."

In other words, whatever the occasion, but especially when the news is unwelcome, be up front. Commit to taking the time to talk it through. Explain how you solve a problem. Use practical, straightforward talk. In the end, you'll have to defend yourself a whole lot less than if all that gold you're spinning turns out a poor excuse for the emperors clothes.

In a word, the difference between fact and news

In my strategic communications partnership, Left/Right Strategies, we promote documentaries. My business partner and I took on a daring independent film called The Living Matrix about a year ago. The Living Matrix puts a cerebral health and healing slant on a style the industry describes as, for lack of precedent, "What the Bleep Do We Know." A collection of interviews with scientists and researchers along with real stories of energy healings, it explores the science of bioenergetic health care in hopes of contributing to the discussion about what constitutes our health and wellbeing.

Huh?

We had to ask: "Explore?" "Contribute?" That's it? This is one of the biggest thrills we get in the communications biz. We get to tell important, gutsy entrepreneurs, "No, that's not what you do." And because entrepreneurs love a devil's advocate, they cut us some slack. That's when we get to say, "That's what you ARE. That's not what you do." And because they hired us to tell the difference, we impart two pieces of advice:

1. What you have to offer is a fact.
2. The problem you solve is news.

So, in the case of our documentary, we told the filmmakers that it is a fact, and a good one, that the film explores the science. But it is news because it challenges conventional medicine to revise its understanding of human biology. . . that scientific evidence shows energy and information are as critical as genetics in determining health and wellbeing." We love documentaries because they walk the talk with one foot in journalism and the other in advocacy. Our advocacy headline for The Living Matrix, eight months later, continues to shake it up on health and healing blogs and websites around the globe. Facebook fanship went from 2 to 2000 in six months. And 20,000 DVDs were sold in about that same time.

Interestingly, the second documentary we represented, another exploration into the science of consciousness and matter, came to us from a communications consultant who didn't have the bandwidth to continue the job. The news in her original press release pretty much stated a good solid fact: "New Documentary Reveals the Science Behind Psychic Phenomena." Good deal. But with a single word - again "challenge" came to mind - the news went from "here we are," to "we tap into the frustrations of people around the globe who want concrete evidence to explain paranormal and psychic experiences."

The real news, "New Documentary Challenges Science to Demystify Paranormal and Psychic Experience," hit this month, and the film has enjoyed a happy spike in DVD sales on the website. What a difference a word makes.

Rethinking the Mission Statement, part 1

New celiac disorder research coincides with gluten-free food bounty

Cameo Edwards, founder of Crave, a San Francisco Bakery, is one of many pastry chefs whose diagnosis of celiac disease led to entrepreneurial ventures in the gluten-free food market. Read about
new celiac disorder research that coincides with the Bay Area's gluten-free food bounty.

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Poetry in Search of Placebo

Searching for scientific research on the placebo effect tonight generated two gems produced by the same source:

• Healing Words website, a platform where medicine and poetry converge. Dr. David Watts of San Francisco is one of the site's producers.
  
• I stumbled upon his commentary on the power of the placebo effect recorded by NPR in 2003.

Poetry. Science. New Thought.

Studies on science of prayer underscore Race for the Cure participant's mission

Photo: Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies the relationship between consciousness and matter.

Last in a series that introduces SFKomen Race for the Cure participant Char Maassen and the science studies behind alternative healing she credits with her 10-year survival of two breast cancer diagnoses. In Part One, science reveals a correlation between support group participation and reduced stress, a factor in healing. In Part Two, science supports Maassen's claim that prayer influenced the success of hormone therapy, which ultimately eliminated lesions on her lungs. In this installment: the scientific studies that link prayer, intention, and compassion to health and healing.

Read more: Studies on science of prayer underscore Race for the Cure participant's mission



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Bay Area Breast Cancer Survivor Uses "Race for the Cure" to Highlight Healing Power of Prayer

In Part 1, San Francisco Race for the Cure participant Char Maassen credited support groups with helping her survive two breast cancer diagnoses. In Part 2, she reveals how her increasing reliance on prayer correlated to some shocking test results that she can't explain but which scientists are beginning to support with empirical evidence.



Bay Area Breast Cancer Survivor Uses "Race for the Cure" to Highlight Healing Power of Prayer

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Local cancer survivor in SF Race for the Cure on 10-year milestone: part 1, support groups

Meet Char Maassen, a double breast cancer survivor, and learn about the Bay Area support groups and community events like next month’s Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure that give patients strength that scientists say improves survival and long-term health.









Local cancer survivor in SF Race for the Cure on 10-year milestone: part 1, support groups

As health care investment, organic food advocates offer ideas to stay bountiful on a budget

Lean economic times may tempt some consumers to steer their shopping carts past organic food choices and opt for lower-priced groceries even if it means increasing their exposure to toxic pesticides. But Bay Area organic food advocates urge shoppers to stay the course, offering a bounty of smart ideas to stretch their organic grocery dollar along with advice not to be misled by straight price comparisons. Read more on link below:

As health care investment, organic food advocates offer ideas to stay bountiful on a budget

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Pictured, Jessica Prentice, author of The Full Moon Feast, is a Bay Area chef and organic food advocate. Photo by Foster Wiley

Government-Run Health Care in the New-Age Economy: Hand-Outs More Okay; What Elephant?

You know that feeling. Maybe you got laid off. Or your surviving parent needs to move in. Or, hey, let's say your health insurance plan's fine print just kicked in and your out-of-pocket just drained the retirement account. What do you do first? That feeling in your gut, the panic, gets you to cut back instantly, right? You cut coupons, buy generic and in bulk, take a bagged lunch, fill the jar with found coins. If it gets worse, maybe you have to let some bills slide. Depending on your situation, maybe you have to sell stuff; maybe even your house. That's the level of desperation that seems to have hit Americans facing health care reform. When the economy was good, most of us could shut the windows, turn on the AC, and avoid the alarms about rising health care costs. Someone who had constituents affected by the problem would take care of it eventually. But, once the jobless rate neared the 6 percent mark in the Indian summer of our economic turmoil, maybe the electric bill went unpaid, because suddenly everyone was opening the windows.

The problems of health insurance, access to care, and rising out-of-pocket costs used to stay tucked neatly out of public policy sight because, let's face it, it afflicted mostly immigrants right? And people who weren't ambitious enough to get a college degree and a reliable job or who made poor choices that landed them in trouble, right? But now that more and more of us near the proverbial "other side of the tracks" -if we haven't crossed already - suddenly it's about all of us, and the panic about access to and cost of health care seems to render banal other concerns like food on the table and meeting the mortgage payment. A look at today's New York Times poll on government-run health insurance reveals that suddenly almost three-quarters of the country supports a government-backed insurance plan and nearly sixty percent are willing to spread the wealth (and receive less luxurious care) to cover folks who are unable to afford it. Huh. Suddenly, it's okay for those less affected by these problems to make the sacrifices that will cover people now affected or threatened by them.

Let's clarify in terms of numbers: Health care spending in 2007 amounted to 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), up from 13 percent in 2000. Between 2006 and 2007, the increase of 6.1 percent in health care spending far outpaced the GDP, which grew by 4.8 percent in that same timeframe, according to the Commerce Department. We spent nearly $7500 per person on health care in 2007. It used to be statistics like these were concealed by stalled legislation and in the shadows of poll results for American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. Now, everyone suddenly seems to be aware that by 2018, nearly one-fifth of the nation's spending will go towards health care.

So today, according to the NYT poll conducted this month, we're more willing to pay higher taxes for a government plan (57%). Half of us -versus 30 percent in 2007 - think the government would better private insurers in providing medical coverage, and 59 percent versus 47 percent in 20007 believe it will hold down health care costs better than private insurers. That's a big change of heart in one year. Like some big ol' wind came blowing through all those open windows.

But in our panic to regroup and restructure to meet our newfound altruistic ideals, no one is acknowledging loudly enough the elephant in the room: The size and weight of a government-run plan could create similarly sizable cost burdens and bloat its bureaucracy, negating intended gains in effectiveness. People who remember when Medicare and Medicaid could produce new illnesses just by participating in the plan know about government-run health care. Veterans who received the 92 botched prostrate cancer treatments out of 116 performed in a span of six years at the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital know about government-run health care.

With most Americans now facing real threats to their ability to afford and receive decent health care, an overhaul of the system is, miraculously, near. But don't be fooled. This isn't going to get us much closer to a good night's sleep. In fact, it's going to throw off our whole circadian rhythm of entitlement. We'll pay, and pay a lot. And we'll have to get used to less. Less choice. Less efficiency. Less of the best. The, um, good news is that more of us will get it.

Let's try to do this without so much panic, though. That's never a good way to make the big decisions.

To Skin a Rattlesnake

Twenty six years ago, I made my first trip to the Fuller family cabin in remote Gravelly Valley, California. East Coast girl's first pioneering adventure in the wild west. There I strolled with my mother in a field of dry grass, where we considered that more than a century earlier on that same plain, hardy ladies in white cotton dresses and bonnets danced to fiddle tunes with gentlemen in black trousers and suspenders. We walked by the swimming pool buried under the silt of the '64 flood waters that washed down the valley a whole compound of rustic cabins, stables, and dining hall along with all the creature comforts of society life delivered from San Francisco. We poked around some broken boards of a washed-out walkway that surrounded the pool when we heard an unsettling sound. We'd been instructed to run if we heard the rattlesnake's warning, so we did. The fellas -- Brian (now my husband), his father George, and brother Kirk -- asked if we might have mistaken a cicadas' pitch there in the June heat, but if there's anything you know better than any other North American if you're from the humid Eastern Seaboard, it's cicadas. We shot them our look, and they grabbed the trident and a shovel. According to the Gravelly rattlesnake code: take no chances where your babies sleep, we had to kill it. The photo above was taken just a moment before the look of horror that came to my face when the field mouse digesting inside that rattler dropped green and slimy out of the beheaded end.

Fast forward to last Saturday; same time of year, damned near same spot where those broken walkway boards lay scattered like bleached bones. This time, the pool is cleaned out, and our son Malcolm and his friend Remington were clearing the old drainage when a big ol' rattler caught their attention. Where Gravelly code trumps animal rights in our little neck of the wilderness, off came its head (but not without second thoughts about passing this legacy onto the kids in front of us). We bury the head to keep animals from chomping onto the venom pouches in its cheeks. As we all stood around marveling at the impulses continuing to make the headless body coil and slither, I suggested we go on in to get a closer look at the decentralized nervous system inside. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, the thrill of biology filled the air, and they knew: a field dissection would be taking place that afternoon. The boys and men gave me a strange look that suggested they were intrigued but had other things suddenly on their agendas.

Remington had a utility knife with a serrated edge on one blade and sharp straight edge on the other. With dramatic ceremony, I removed the rattle and handed the trophy over to him, as my father-in-law had done for my mother and me a quarter century earlier. It's a mistake to think the segments on a rattle indicate age like the rings in a tree trunk. They gain new segments each time they shed their skin, which can occur several times a year.


I carried the body back to the cabin grounds where I nailed it to a tree to drain. A few hours later, I secured it to a board and began the necropsy. The photo to the left shows the first cut, and the ones below show my laboratory, the midsection cut, and the skin drying on the board after I cleaned it in the creek. (Admittedly at that point it had become a badge of honor.)




I spare you the macro-lens close-ups I took of the various stages of dissection (but if you have the stomach for it, click on the links below), during which I learned:

• The skin comes away quite easily from the flesh; only a thin membrane and some white fibers binds them.
• The skin around the tail end is tougher and more tightly bound to the flesh.
• A long silver cord extends from the neck and reminded me of a spinal cord without the vertebrae to protect it. This is the snake's trachea; it ends near the heart.
• The main organs gather about three inches below the head. It's the only place the body bleeds.
• Gas exchanges that occur near the lungs were still functioning after I cut; thin membranes filled up like bubbles.
• Fat collected around the other end, over the kidneys, small intestine and colon.
• You simply can't appreciate the intricate pattern on a snake skin until it lays flat.
• Rattlesnakes have scent glands at their tail; I didn't see them.
  

Removing the skin

Main organs
Gallbladder
Kidney

The Sounds of Science, Part II

Warning: the following story contains subject matter considered offensive to people who favor cute things. Scroll to the bottom for the happy ending. Hitchcock-lovers, read on.

Another hike, another bird. Probably on a first solo flight. It fluttered clumsily from its perch to a tree limb 12 or 15 feet away. The onomatopoetic sound of a gawky little Bewick's wren during a practice flight is as you'd expect, especially if it nearly stumbles into your left ear: Lots of spluttering flaps and flops.

But it was quite another sound of science nature's near-encounter called to mind for the remainder of the hike. It was a sound that occurred almost 14 years ago in the yard of a little cottage that we'd just moved into with our two toddlers. This 100-year-old summer retreat built as an escape from San Francisco's foggy season nests in a stand of redwoods at the foot of Mt. Tamalpais in the leafy little town of Larkspur. A postage-stamp-sized forest full of ferns, dogwood, magenta rhododendrons, and camellia trees, the yard was packed with bugs and birds and woodland creatures that enchanted the kids and me day and night. One spring morning, when I was weeding around a camellia tree, I heard the squeaky little squawks of newly hatched robins in a nest just a few feet above my head. I hustled the kids over to the tree for that up-close experience with outdoor biology at the heart of the reason we'd moved there. "Watch!" I whispered to convey appropriate awe. And just as they lifted their little chins to the sky, a stringy brown mass of mucous dropped from the nest, and before I could shield their eyes, caught by its malformed head in the Y of a branch where it hung lifeless and limp.

Obviously something went horribly wrong in that nest; very likely, one of the eggs was attacked by a Stellar's Jay or an aggressive sparrow who hadn't finished lunch before the mom returned. The sound in this science story? Let's just call it the "soundlessness of science." About three long minutes of it, accompanied by dropped jaws and bulging eyes. Then the kids took off crying while I stood frozen in the stunned mute numbness of my backyard biology lab. Still, ugly is part of nature's beauty, so if this story inspires anything, how about taking part in next year's backyard bird count?

In closing and by way of an up-note, here's a little something I made out of another backyard ornithological adventure.

Michael Pollan: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

There are so many reasons to listen to this interview with Michael Pollan, journalism professor at UC Berkeley and author of books including "In Defense of Food" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma." If you care about the planet, community farms, local labor, your health, go for it. But, here's the journalism genius to this guy: count the sound bites. His talk is riddled with them. Genius PR comes from journalist turned accidental avocate.


Michael Pollan: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

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The Sounds of Science

When I was a kid, I climbed a giant fir tree to look inside the nest of a morning dove. What I remember most about the experience was the deep silence among the branches 50 feet off the ground, and the intensity of wildlife sounds set against that silence. The rush of wind through the branches. The sweet falsetto of the spring robin. Cicadas' squawks piercing the sky. From that perch, I heard in my backyard the sounds of the serenity my childhood lacked in other places, and that moment probably inspired for good a preference for the pleasures of outdoor science. Another inspiration came when I made the mistake of creeping far out on the limb where the nest perched, convinced the mother bird would sense my benevolent nature and welcome my approach dearly. Of course, her instinct to flee was ineluctable, and she took off, leaving two stone-white orbs to rot in her absence.

The lesson learned when the poetic yearnings of a country girl met the reality of science stuck. Distance is the only way to express one's intimacy out there.

This morning, I thought about that moment in the tree-top while hiking along a surprisingly silent Corte Madera ridge on Mt. Tamalpais, which rises up above my current backyard. For some reason, whether the breeze blew a certain direction or the cool air slowed the wakings of wildlife, the otherwise more subtle tones of nature were particularly magnified in that early hour. The rustle of drying overgrown grasses against my bare legs. The clicking jaws of munching caterpillars in the oaks overhead. The ghostly wail of a hungry hawk beyond the canopy. And bees. Where ever I went, the sound of bee swarms followed, as though this was a day of some great feeding frenzy on the nectar of new April blooms.

At one point on a narrow deer path, shrubs of Rock Rose and Pride of Madiera crowded the thoroughfare. I stopped when I realized they were alive with the urgent beating wings of bees hovering over the pistals of the blue and purple blossoms, and from the waist down, I stood in the middle of one of nature's most primal events. Bees, in their hysteria, darted on and off their flight paths, occasionally plunking loudly against my legs, and then hurling themselves back into the shrubs to join the others desperately drilling their proboscises deep into the flowers' styles to penetrate the nectar-filled ovaries. Considering their mission, it was easy to see why this was one time nature might overlook my presence so up close and personal. So I took advantage of the moment, letting the chainsaw sound of their spasms surround me and defying the potential danger of a sting or two.

Social Media Marketing Digestives from Seattle's Health Care Journalism Conference

Jump on the social media bandwagon
Originally uploaded by Matt Hamm

Searching for an open coffee shop on an early Saturday morning in Seattle is like having to go out of your way to find a martini in San Francisco or file gumbo in New Orleans or taco trucks in Los Angeles. After a few visits, I'm learning and loving this town, but still figuring out whether its character is coming or going. More on that in Facebook.

At the Association of Health Care Journalists conference here, exploring the social media universe left the same impression. When Monica Guzman of SeattlePI.com (the digital leftovers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) reminded the audience of journalists, thank goodness, that it's social media, which invites writers to use an informal tone and not shy away from personal touches when posting on social media platforms, you could hear the mandibles clench. In healthcare, an informal tone is as elusive as this morning's first caffeine kick. And to journalists, getting personal is anathema to their "Hippocratic" oath. Both converged here to explain why so many people in the room resist social media as a platform for their work as well as self-marketing ideas like branding to help them compete. "I'm an investigative reporter! No way!" "I'm from the old school; advertising is still the dark side." "Twitter and Facebook are just a big waste of time."

I hope the humbling experiences bravely candidly shared by the new reluctant freelancers at this conference opened their minds because most of the folks I met were in or threatened by some sort of job transition. For the first time in my entire media relations career, the esteemed writers/reporters were questioning their place. Luckily, enough journalists had gracefully lept the social media divide and, while not all secure in their jobs, at least demonstrated the dignity and professionalism with which social media can be accomplished.

Alternative Medicine Even a Science Geek Can Embrace

I was contracted recently to promote a new documentary called The Living Matrix, which will have its world premier at The Science of Healing Conference in London next month. Quite an assignment for a self-acclaimed science enthusiast: a film that challenges the conventional medical community to reconsider its understanding of human biology. Energy and information fields -- not genetics -- drive human physiology and biochemistry, the scientists and researchers in the film assert. Now, I'm no stranger to alternative health care. My kids have had engaged in energetic medicine for their food allergies, a sort of electrodermal screening of their energy fields and the ingestion of drops imprinted with healing information. For myself, I'm under the care of an integrative medicine practitioner MD who combines conventional and alternative care. I've also participated in energy healings, body work, homeopathy, yoga, and meditation. But the idea of redefining my beloved subject of biology to include energy and information fields was a stretch for me. Until I did the research for my writing assignments. Turns out, there's lots of science to back it up. Here's a sneak peak at one of the pieces I created for the documentary press kit:

What is bio-energetic medicine?

To understand bio-energetic medicine, you have to connect some dots that conventional medicine leaves unconnected. We know that all living things emit energy in the form of electromagnetic frequencies. We measure these frequencies in the heart with electrocardiographs (ECGs) and in the brain with electroencephalographs (EEGs). In fact, magneto encephalographs (MEGs) measure these frequencies in the brain without even touching the body, so we even acknowledge that these frequencies extend beyond the body; that they are being broadcast outside the physical structure. Next, when quantum physics was discovered 80 years ago, we all came to agree that matter, including the human body, is made up of subatomic particles that emit energy. And we know that these particles react with other particles to create more energy.

That’s a lot of energy moving through the human body, and thousands of years ago, these fields of energy were central to our understanding of health and wellness. That was when medical practitioners understood how these systems of energy interacted with the physical and chemical systems of the body to make us well, and how the disruption of these interactions made us ill. However, when scientists wanted to record the universe in measurable terms, they separated it into components that they could label: the mind from the body, people from each other, and space from time. Newton further defended the notion of the human body as a separate machine, the heart as a stand-alone mechanical pump, the brain as a distinct repository of information, and DNA as the only information the body needed to operate. Because the machines to measure and label energy were generations away, modern scientists defended the ultimate and most damaging separation of all: the separation of energy from biology. Eastern medicine continued to thrive on an understanding of the role of energy in human biology; Western medicine wanted evidence before it would reconsider.

Bio-energetic medicine brings back together the body’s energy systems with its chemical and physiological systems to reestablish a comprehensive understanding of human biology. And because we are all connected to and influenced by our environment, this energy exchange also includes the transfer of energy between the human body’s energy field and all other things around us that also emit energy. Because we now have ways to measure the human body’s energy fields and because scientists have studied and recorded evidence of energy healing, conventional medicine is more receptive to its effectiveness. It is called “bio” energy to reinforce its connection to not separation from biology.

Quantum physics. Newton. EEGs and ECGs. What more could a science geek ask for?

FOR Patients, Not TO Patients

The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley did a darn good job presenting its third Business of Health Care conference yesterday. The business of health care being a titanic scheme, proportionately it was an intimate affair of about 250 attendees. But, the three keynotes all were relevant to the economic stimulus package and its three controversial health care components. In fact, Paul Keckley’s keynote was so timely, he had to cut it short to catch a plane to D.C., where, in his role as executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, he would advise senators in the final sprint towards their vote on Tuesday. The panels offered something for everyone, whether you wanted to spend the entire day bathing in health care reform, stick your heart in either the vice of global health or the vice of chronic disease management, or stir your entrepreneurial spirit in technology and innovation.

A few stand-outs:

In the proper system, we would do things for patients, not to patients. Doug Goodin, MD, Director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center, UCSF Medical Center.

65 percent of Californians are overweight. David Ormerod, MD, Regional Medical Director, Blue Shield
I looked up this fact, so shocking did it sound for a population obsessed with looks, fashion, and cosmetic surgery. According to various charts, he is in the right range. CalorieLabs’ chart says we are 59 percent overweight and 23 percent obese. The CDC has a scary animated map that shows how the country has gotten fatter year by year since 1985. In 1985, no state recorded obesity rates of more than 15 percent. In 1995, only half the states had obesity rates of less than 15 percent, and by 2008, only one state, Colorado, could make that claim. By 2008, between 25 and 29 percent of Americans were obese.

Health care will make up 32 percent of the Gross Domestic Product by 2037; 49 percent by 2062. Leonard Schaeffer, chairman and CEO of WellPoint.

125 million Americans have some chronic illness. 75 percent of the health care expenditures in the U.S. go towards chronic care. Steve Shortell, Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

In the current system, nobody has any incentive to manage health care. For chronic disease, for example, physicians get paid only to treat, not manage. So they tend to keep their distance once their job is done. Medicare pays only 60 days of home health. In one extreme example of incentive gone awry, cited in my lunch conversation with Duncan Ross, VP and General Manager of Blue Shield, at one time, stomach bypass surgeries were covered only if the patient was officially obese. Nearly obese folks who didn’t qualify started packing on the pounds if they wanted the surgery.

A universal voucher payment system: Consumers would receive vouchers that they could use with health care insurers. The voucher system would be funded by taxes imposed on items that are known to impair health, such as junk food, tobacco, alcohol. Omerond.
So, in theory, that extra 50 cents you pay on the big mac goes toward the insulin shot you might need in 10 years. Seems fair, except even teetotalers and athletes get sick.

45 percent of the treatment in the U.S. is not based on diagnosis. Schaeffer

“In looking at drugs that will cure neglected diseases in some of the poorest regions of the world, sometimes there isn’t a market.” Jana Armstrong, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.

“Unless costs are controlled, budget hawks will combine forces with national security experts to set health care policy by default.” Schaeffer.

The Case of Mushroom Soup and Medical Hoops

Through all the years of economic development that turned my tiny hometown from dairy country into an overdeveloped bedroom community at the far end of the T-line that feeds commuters into Boston, the woods behind my grandparents' house miraculously remains untouched. It's our own little Kampong Buangkok, where time stands still. Where unripe wild blueberries iridesce in the green light of the sugar maple canopy, lady slippers nod ladylike among fragmented breezes, and intoxicating vapors of moist decay rise from the forest floor. Intoxicating, indeed. For its seemingly enchanting surroundings, it's one of the deadliest places on earth if we're talking mushrooms.

My grandmother loved that the woods gave her easy access to mushroom picking, just like her mother did in Italy when she was a little girl. She fit the profile of the picker most likely to misidentify mushrooms: people from Europe or Asia who go after look-alikes from their homeland. Mercifully, she didn't cook amanitas phalloides, or Death Caps, into a soup and feed them to her grandchildren like the 72-year-old woman from Ithaca, NY, did right here in Marin County the day after Christmas last year. According to my mycology-buff neighbor Dave, amanitas, one of the deadliest of mushrooms for its unstoppable and swift sabotage of the body's organs, does not grow back East but looks like edible varieties that do. On the other hand, a quick tour of mycology blogs and websites after the recent incident revealed a common code of survival for anyone who picks mushrooms anywhere other than the produce section of the local Safeway: don't ingest from a source you haven't picked before without having the fungi tested. You might as well play Russian roulette or chase funnel clouds with low gas tanks. Precise identification is to mushroom picking what mesh hoods are to bee keepers and gloves are to snake venom extractors. The problem, I learned from the blogs-o-sphere, is the only experts to identify your mistakes all are employed at poison control centers --the folks who only enter the picture when it's too late.

We read these stories in the local papers at least once a year. The most recent headlines featured death caps picked in Santa Cruz and on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. The families survived solely by luck and circumstance. And two small miracles: one at the FDA and one at the California Poison Control. The Santa Cruz Sentinal reported that a local doctor happened to attend a presentation at a European toxicology conference in Seville, Spain in which he learned about silybinin, a milk thistle extract. A German drug maker formulates silybinin into an intravenous preparation as a treatment for mushroom poisoning. After obtaining emergency FDA approval for a one-time use to save the Santa Cruz family in 2007, the doctor, Todd Mitchell, landed on the radar of the California Poison Control. This is an organization that stays on top of every development for every poison known to man and staffs a team to address hundreds of thousands of life-saving phone calls but, according to my friend, Patrick Finley, a psychopharmacologist at UCSF, has to appeal to the state for its funding every year. When the Ithaca grandmother and her grandchildren contacted Poison Control, it remembered Dr. Mitchell and called him to help contact the German company.

This is the part about jumping through medical hoops: It so happens that back in Seville, Mitchell met the toxicologist considered the worldwide authority on the medical implications of amatoxin poisoning -- who happened to live in Munich. They happened to email at least once in the past. So for case of the death cap soup, when Mitchell couldn't reach the German drug maker because it was closed for the holidays, and when he couldn't reach the Munich toxicologist, also likely on holiday, to help pave the way, that archived email just happened to contain the office phone number for a colleague who happened to be in his office after 6 p.m. in Munich during a time when all of Europe shuts down for two weeks. The colleague obtained the drug and arranged for Lufthansa to bump a wait-list passenger so that it could accommodate a courier delivering the silybinin. In the meantime, even though Mitchell could not use the same FDA emergency identification number for the Mt. Tamalpais case, the notoriously understaffed behemoth FDA managed nimbly to turn around a new number within an unprecedented few hours. The vials of silybinin arrived within 24 hours of Poison Control's first call to Mitchell, but fewer than expected. Because children have higher mortality rates to mushroom poisoning, Mitchell administered the proper doses to the children and what was left to the grandmother.

Historically in the U.S., only expensive and rare emergency liver transplants save the lives of people who mistake death caps for nostaligic fungii from other lands. Basically, unlikely survival. But the two families treated with silybinin made complete recoveries and went home with their own livers. It is a no-brainer, making such a drug easily available in the U.S., but according to the Santa Cruz Sentinal article, the FDA hasn't approved it because the costs -- for research and clinical trials -- is too high for the small market of mushroom poisoning here versus in Europe. A small market. Granted, it's all about funding and taxes and, eventually, the economy. But there's something about the "m" word that strikes a discordant note when it comes to simple plants that can save lives.

The Drying and Dying of Salmon Seeding

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
– John Quincy Adams

Above, recent facts and evidence of the human impact on the salmon population -- ten water specimens taken from various collection sites in the Lagunitas watershed -- await transportation to a lab that will test them for impurities from homes and businesses along the waterway. Results will offer a small slice of understanding in the drastic decline of coho salmon, a problem Californians claim they are passionate to resolve.

One hundred years ago, 6000 coho salmon spawned in the Lagunitas watershed on the northwest side of Mount Tamalpais. So many so that recreational fishers scooped them up like pennies from the wishing well. This year, so few were counted, fisheries biologists can't bring themselves to utter the number. But if in 2008 they counted only 20 egg nests, I fear the term "extinction" will come tumbling out if they open their mouths at all.

A series of dams built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the San Geronimo Valley, through which the Lagunitas waterway rambles, blocked about 50 percent of the coho population. Homes and roads built along the waterways damaged riparian habitat, creating further decline. That's a lot of disincentive for the female salmon that travel 33 miles from the Pacific Ocean though the San Geronomo Valley water system to lay their eggs in the same place they were born three years earlier. Add to that three years of drastically low rain levels, and you get a hostile ecosystem too dry and too dangerous for the fish to reach their spawning grounds.

In 2005, the coho were listed as an endangered species, and in that year, only 190 egg nests, or redds, were counted in the Lagunitas watershed. In 2007, 148 redds were counted. That doesn't look like a big drop unless you know that in 2006, 338 redds were created by the females born in 2003, when 383 redds were counted, but the 190 redds counted in 2007 came from a population of 496 redds. It doesn't take a math whiz to calculate the inevitable for the 20 redds counted this year. Whatever may be our wishes for the coho recovery -- and the recovery of salmon population throughout California -- the facts and evidence suggest recent low rain levels fail to balance the compromised flow of dammed waterways already hindered by stripped riparian habitats, and spawning will deteriorate to the point of no return if left to nature alone.

The Lagunitas watershed is considered the keystone watershed along the coast because A) it has supported the largest wild run of salmon left in the state, historically about 10 percent of California's coho population, and B) fisheries agencies look to Lagunitas to seed neighboring watersheds in their recovery efforts. But with so little rain the last three years, the number of redds in the watershed this year represents an alarming 89 percent drop in the number of returning offspring. The dams aren't going away and no amount of wishing will recalibrate the climate shifts that reduce rain levels and dry up what little water has collected in the watershed in the past four dry years. What's a watershed to do? For one thing, organizations like Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) and The Marin Municipal Water District rescue trapped juvenile salmon as waterways dry up. Since 1996, SPAWN (and more recently, MMWD) has been restoring habitat and monitoring the creeks. SPAWN also supports land acquisition, and educates the community.

As a result, the community support is overwhelming. During the first day of a six-week field study testing water quality in the watershed, neighbors around several of the specimen collection sites in town came out of their houses and shops to inquire, report, or worry about low or no fish sitings. Several offered to help in the effort, even if it was to show off their riparian repair efforts along the creeks running through their back yards or to direct us to fuller collection pools. In the more remote areas, people pulled over to the side of the road to come watch the collection and measurement efforts. And to inquire, report, or worry about low or no fish sitings. The study will measure the impact at the half-way point of a two-year county ordinance banning new construction inside the county's mandated Stream Conservation Area within the San Germonimo Valley, which seems to have enthusiastic community support. One of the collection volunteers who learned she could not build a ground base station for a solar-panel installation shrugged her tolerance.

As passionate as we seem to resolve the decline in the salmon population, its impact on the state's fishing industry, and the repercussions to human health, these efforts are a spit in the sea compared to the enormity of the problem statewide. Laudable and necessary, that goes without saying, especially given the dire need for human activism to reconcile its own impairments. With little hope of any significant reversal in global warming this year, however, we'll need something immediate on the order of a 40-days-and-40-nights miracle to restore hope for this spawning season. If you know any rain dances, send instructions soon.

A Surgeon General for the Masses

President-elect Barack Obama appointed Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, and the pundit caterwaul has begun. Amusing and ironic, isn't it, that the voyernalists who've turned outcry into a form of news delivery are screeching over a fellow screecher's qualifications to communicate to the masses? The truth of the matter is that Gupta, like any other choice for this position, possesses some of the right qualifications and lacks others. But the surgeon general's job is to communicate best practices in health care to the American people. And if you've been paying attention, overwhelming evidence indicates that folks haven’t been inspired by past surgeons general: they are smoking more, drinking more, eating more, and risking more and varied drugs behaviors. CDC statistics bear this out, especially among 18 to 34 years olds. And people older than 34 are either increasing, staying the same, or decreasing minimially the risky behaviors that have turned the nation's health care delivery and insurance systems into medical and fiscal wrecking yards.

Let’s face it, we are, by and large (no pun intended), a digital nation that sources most of its health information from sensationalist television, followed closely by Internet search engines, blogs and headlines that twist context for entertainment value. Obama’s no idiot; he and his people are so good at reaching and convincing Americans, they can turn red into blue. It’s all well and good if you have appointees with gravitas, expertise, experience, and accolades; it does nothing if nobody listens. Gupta has all of the above plus he can inspire an entertainment hungry nation to action. Look at the guy: he's fit and trim, thinks fast on his feet, possesses the equinimity of a monk while juggling duties in several high-stress positions, and has great teeth. He could be riddled with all sorts of cancers, infections, and communicable diseases and nobody would really care because we like to eat dinner in front of the evening news. So, yeah, there are probably thousands of people more qualified to take the job, but if you want results, and especially if you need them fast, you have to get your audience 1) to listen and 2) behave. If a handsome, charming, erudite television surgeon gets our celebrity-obsessed nation to change its woeful ways, why complain?

(Even if takes sexy photos of well cut leaders emerging from exotic waters, if the subliminal messaging works, why mess with it?)

Hope for Learners Left Behind

As I was testing perfect salad firmness of avocados in the organic section of the market last weekend, an old friend drew up next to me to squeeze oranges for ripeness. By “old” friend, I mean one of those mothers who vectored off into other circles when the kids hit middle school and stopped depending on us for play dates. As members of the work-at-home crowd of parents who showed up for all the volunteer jobs at the elementary school, we saw each other almost every day serving hot lunch or arguing construction budgets at school committee meetings or organizing foundation fundraising events. After I declined to run for the school committee, she won the seat and did a much better job than I could have, having just started a new job and spending three hours a night helping our son navigate the labyrinth of mainstream homework with learning disabilities. Squeezing fruit and vegetables somehow created a safe bridge for my old friend to confess the same frustrations of public school for her youngest child’s learning disabilities. There we were, two public school champions, taking the first step in the 12-step process of defecting to private schools: admitting the public schools failed for our children. The guilt was as pungent as the bin of brown bananas nearby.

When it became clear that not only would our son meet his academic potential in a private school setting but that he could do it without the struggle that strangled his self-confidence and made, by his own account, “every day an embarrassment” for him, choosing private over public school was easy. But our public school comrades hummed agreement in that curt way that makes their disapproval obvious. This is Marin, after all, so of course it looked to many of our modestly-comfortable or not-obscenely-wealthy friends like the privileged motivation of the typical indulged Marin family. There’s no reasoning with privileged people who compete for reverse status, especially when their children sail through the best public schools in the state without a hitch. So the transition to a private school in San Francisco wasn’t difficult. Not a day goes by, though, when I don’t think about privilege. We could never have chosen private school without investing a good chunk of our retirement savings in the years of tuition ahead of us. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about all the kids who need something more suited to their learning styles than the assembly-line, learn-to-the test version of education but whose families don’t have the savings accounts to afford it: The fifty percent of “juvenile delinquents tested and found to have undetected learning disabilities” (National Center for State Courts and Educations Testing Services); the more than sixty percent of adolescents in treatment for substance abuse who were found to have learning disabilities. (Hazeldon Foundation, Minnesota 1992). Not only can’t these kids pay for the education they need, there's no way they can buy the testing that reveals they learn differently -- not combatively or lazily or stupidly. Or the chelation therapies that will drain the heavy metals from their blood and ease the stranglehold on their brains. Or the diet and nutrition guidance that discovers allergies that give them brain fog. Or the MRIs that determine the precise attention deficit disorder and corresponding precise medication and therapy. To name a scant few.

We began our journey to determine our son’s learning differences just before President Bush promised no child would be left behind. But like all the rest that came before him since the post-industrial institutionalization of public school education, he was thinking to fix a broken system by means of that broken system. Think about it: learning support, IEPs, 501Ks, teachers’ aides, to name a few of the fixes available to children for whom the typical classroom fails to teach are just that --fixes like patches on worn elbows or seams taken in or let out of an ill fitting shirt. Unfortunately, the shirt and the pants and the jacket are all part of the emperor’s wardrobe. Public school is a system designed to meet the needs of only about half the students (if that) it serves – kids who can sit still in straight lines for hours on end staring at the lines in a book or lines of words on a distant chalkboard, and listen while taking more lines of notes in perfect outline format. Kids who can hold the question until the end of the lecture, remember it, and use the answer to verify the assignment that he completed in the meantime anyway. Who can divert spit balls and bird calls and pins dropping and the genius jumping ahead to the next problem all at the same time without losing her train of thought. Who learn by reading the text and succeed by acing the test. The other half of the student population has to figure out how to compromise their untapped intelligence, drop out, or go someplace where the shoes and the shirt fit. (Or where if they don’t, you can get in without them.) All for the price of a private four-year college education, which hopefully comes next by the way.

In the next four to eight years, we are hoping for the change we need in the way our government doles out health care and insurance, rethinks unemployment support, and reengineers the financial, automotive and environmental industries. It’s going to take a stab at education too, but like those other programs, the new emperor mustn’t try to fit into the old emperor’s clothes. The system must be designed from the ground up to teach all learners, not just the smart and easy ones. In the words of one private school's mission to meet the needs of all learning styles, the right system will ask "not how smart is the child, but how is the child smart?"

My friend was all smiles as she told me with breathy relief about finally, after several years and countless doctors and specialists and educational alternatives, finding her son the right learning environment. Her story resonated both joyfully and painfully. Her boy, who has a mild autism disorder and visual and auditory disabilities, goes to a private school half the time and sees a tutor the other half. “The brutality is over,” she said, referring to his (and ultimately their) struggle to learn in public school. “But the financial bleeding has just begun.” He’s lucky, that one, to be among the few children who actually need the privilege and get it. Oftentimes in a privileged environment, the ones who least need it get most of it and do less with it. Here’s hoping for change that meets the needs of students with different learning styles who will show meaningful results with a little more advantage.