16 January 2024 Dear Colleagues and Friends, Holidays, and winter illnesses, and the opportunity to get together with friends and family. It’s difficult to get back into the New Year routine, but exciting to look forward to another year of workshops, activities and research into our field. My report on the big A4M conference in Las Vegas is simple and one word: disappointing. Vegas is no longer “cheap” but rather exorbitantly expensive (even for food court meals) and the travel (even though winter had not yet struck in force) [...]

And Your December 2023 Releases Med-Week Resources, Part 2 This will be a brief and incomplete listing of some of the many companies represented at the recent Medicine Week Congress. In the few weeks since sending you my initial impressions of that amazing congress, I’ve had a chance to reorganize not just my thoughts but also the reams of information and cards I gathered while wandering the exhibits. Because I am not an active practitioner, but rather a lecturer, researcher and writer, my perspective when viewing the exhibits is [...]

November 2023 My dear Colleagues and Friends, What an adventure! For the first time in four years, I made the pilgrimage journey to Baden-Baden, Germany to participate in the annual Medicine Week Congress. For me, traveling by myself with no group and no set schedule for extra meetings, it was almost a holiday. I had the opportunity to visit with several colleagues from former times now that we can also be friends without the formality of business responsibilities. I visited briefly at Medical Electronics in Rheinau (still an interesting [...]

16 October 2023 As I have moved forward with preparations and organization for my two forthcoming conference travels (be sure to watch my “away from my desk” dates!), it has been a pleasure to talk with a number of “old” friends and colleagues. I appreciate every single one of those calls and Zoom meetings. It helps to ground and focus my thoughts and to ensure the information I’m sending you remains relevant and useful. Many of us are once again venturing back into the busy conference and seminar schedules. [...]

12 September 2023 Dear Colleagues and Friends, With so many activities and weeks passing since the previous newsletter issue, I’ll try to keep this sort of brief and add in some of the interesting tidbits that have crossed my desk in the meantime. P2P and OIRF: Thank you for your patience and understanding as I took a rather long “summer” hiatus from my usual duties and chores for P2P/OIRF to work on the OIRF legacy project. Although I focused solely on collecting and categorizing all the materials for input [...]

April 2023 How can there be so much change, so quickly and without our knowledge or consent? I quote: British Columbia’s New Powers to Silence Dissenting Physicians Recently passed legislation puts involuntary treatment and mandatory compliance into effect. Commentary by Mary Lowther “OMNS (April 13, 2023) Last November the British Columbia Provincial Government introduced the Health Professions and Occupations Act, also referred to as Bill 36, passed and enacted with a minimum of debate, consultation or media promulgation. It empowers the government to assume more control over how health [...]

February 2023 Following what has been a long and rather dark winter for me personally, I finally found the courage to reach out to a colleague for help in recovering. I guess we must always remember the old saw about “he who has himself for a physician, has a fool for a physician” and look outside of our own knowledge and expertise when healing seems difficult or ineffective. In spite of my long weeks of RSV, Covid, bronchitis, depression and unexpectedly deep grief for the recent loss of my [...]

An Introductory Commentary Dear Colleagues and Readers, Barely three years have passed since we first heard of a new virus (with the name SARS-CoV-2) and from its consequences somewhere in China people were seriously ill and in some instances died. At that time, hardly anyone here in Germany and Europe thought too much about it. Above all no one at that time would have believed what happened worldwide a few months later: The entire public life ground to a halt. As unprepared as our health care system was, the [...]

January 2023 Dear Colleagues and Friends, As I move into this New Year of 2023 as well as this new chapter in my life, I feel counterbalanced with optimism for the future but weighed down by the frustrating worldwide controversies, upheavals and often corruption. While many prayed for hope, peace, joy, love and prosperity throughout the holiday and year-end festivities, we are still surrounded by reports of the disastrous events of 2022 that have changed the face of politics, economics and healthcare for far into the future. As I [...]

28 November 2022 Dear Colleagues and Friends, By now you’ve seen the “new” email format. I have been chastised and so all my extra and extended words will now fill up digital space on this website, rather than the somewhat irregular monthly emails of the past. Partly this has arisen as my IT Guru Chad told me about his impressions of the email “newsletters”. Additionally, he is also helping me prepare and download nearly five decades of data as we build the new OIRF website. So many changes in [...]