Should a Person with Autism Be Allowed to Become a Professional Boxer and Put His Life at Risk?
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It’s a struggle that parents of children with special needs face every day and well into that child’s adulthood: how much decision-making latitude is safe?
NOKI is an empowering story from Douglas Farrago, MD, about a young man with autism who wants to become a professional boxer. Life’s circumstances have dictated the reason for him choosing this path. The lawless world of boxing has its reasons for embracing Noki and his abilities. And they are not good ones. So, the debate wages on: Should Noki be allowed to make the life-altering decision to enter the ring and put his life on the line?
Meanwhile, what few know is that Noki is actually a savant and can imitate and transform himself into any legendary boxer he wants — a plot twist that allows NOKI to pay homage to some of the greatest boxers of all time.
Dr. Farrago draws upon his experiences as an All-American collegiate boxer, a sports medicine trainer for professional boxers in Houston and his decades-long career in medicine during which he worked with autism patients to lend authenticity to his characters and narrative.
“Noki becomes somewhat of a hero to those with special needs in this story, which I think is pretty cool,” he said. “I felt it would be nice if a story showed that those with autism don’t need to be anything but themselves, and maybe it is the rest of us who need to change.”
Ultimately, NOKI is a heartwarming story that will spark real conversations about the limits that society places on people with special needs. Knowingly or not.
Author Douglas Farrago, MD, is board certified in the specialty of Family Practice. Recently retired, he had a large following of autistic and special needs patients in his career. Dr. Farrago is the inventor of the Knee Saver, which is currently in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Knee Saver and its knock-offs are worn by many major league baseball catchers. He also invented the CryoHelmet, used by athletes for head injuries as well as migraine sufferers.
Dr. Farrago received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Virginia in 1987, his Master of Education degree in Exercise Science from the University of Houston in 1990 and his Medical Degree from the University of Texas at Houston in 1994. His residency training occurred way up north at the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. Dr. Farrago still blogs every day on his website Authenticmedicine.com and lectures worldwide about the present crisis in our healthcare system and the effect it has on the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Farrago has written six books to date, his latest one being NOKI.
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Your veterinarian chose to dedicate his or her life to the altruistic pursuit of tending to the health and lives of pets. What you may not have considered is that the health and life of your veterinarian also needs protecting: he or she is nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than someone among the general population. But there are ways you can help.
Sandy Weaver, author of the groundbreaking new book Happy Vet Happy Pet: Caring for Your Pet’s Caregiver, is on a mission to ease the lives of veterinarians, one client’s heart at a time.
“I’ve known for years, as have those in the veterinary field, that there was an issue with suicide and veterinarians,” Sandy says. “Then in early 2019, the CDC report on veterinary suicide was published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and what had been anecdotal became data: male veterinarians are 2.1 times more likely, and female veterinarians are 3.5 times more likely, to complete suicide than their non-veterinarian peers.”
Happy Vet Happy Pet is a distillation of Sandy’s research into neuroscience, neuroplasticity and positive psychology mixed with data from the CDC report. The result is an impactful approach that weaves easy-to-understand science with stories that touch the minds and the hearts of pet owners — empowering them to be part of the solution.
Chapters dive deep into topics all pet owners should understand, including:
The heart, mind and life of a person who decides to become a veterinarian;
The very human, very vulnerable person behind the scrubs;
The ways clients unknowingly mistreat their pets’ caregivers;
Three simple rules to follow to help your veterinary team; and
What to do if you feel that someone near you is facing suicidal desperation.
Happy Vet Happy Pet shares Sandy’s unique point of view that it takes a village to save a veterinarian. “Making pet owners mindful of how their behavior impacts their veterinarian mobilizes the village to help solve the problem,” she adds.
This book will change your relationship with your veterinarian and their team forever. And what you learn in this book could save your veterinarian’s life.
Author Sandy Weaver is an expert speaker, trainer, mastermind facilitator and lover of all things dog.
As the Program Director of the Center for Workplace Happiness, Sandy creates the training programs, workshops, mastermind groups and keynotes that help people lead happier, more successful lives. She is also a citizen-scientist in the fields of neuroscience, neuroplasticity and positive psychology. In 2019, she took the resilience tools and strategies she’d been teaching to general audiences and crafted programs specifically for veterinary teams. Her goal is to touch the life of every veterinarian and technician in a way that helps them avoid the pain and despair that comes with an inability to manage stress.
Now in her 40th year of Siberian Husky ownership, Sandy is a passionate advocate for veterinarians and their teams and an ongoing donor to Not One More Vet.
Now, More Than Ever, Fighting for Our Children’s Needs Must Come First
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Children dream without boundaries; they aspire to become paleontologists, astronauts, doctors and teachers without considering socioeconomic barriers, discrimination, disease outbreaks, violence or any one of a host of other challenges impacting their likelihood of success. It’s up to us, as a society, to help each and every child fulfill his or her potential. In fact, the future of our nation depends on it.
NBC/MSNBC public health analyst, pediatrician and activist Dr. Irwin Redlener delivers a potent wake-up call that compellingly underscores the urgency with which we must work toward fulfilling the potential of all children in his inspirational call to action, The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America, which contains a new preface and afterword addressing COVID-19 and its impact on kids.
Inadequate education, barriers to health care and crushing poverty make it overwhelmingly difficult for many children to realize their dreams — and these issues have been dramatically compounded by the pandemic. Finding ways to alter these trajectories is serious, grown-up business, Dr. Redlener emphasizes, and it’s time for us to act.
“We need heartstrings to be tugged by the folks who work on the front lines … But we also need the hard-core, take-no-prisoners types who demand that those empowered to determine priorities and allocate resources understand and respond to the needs of children,” he writes.
In The Future of Us, Dr. Redlener draws upon his four decades of professional experiences to examine our nation’s health care safety nets and special programs that are designed to protect and nurture our most vulnerable kids, but that too often fail to do so.
The book follows Dr. Redlener’s long, colorful career, from his work as a pediatrician in the Arkansas delta, to treating child abuse in a Miami hospital, to helping children in the aftermaths of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. He has served on the board of USA for Africa, cofounded the Children’s Health Fund with Paul Simon (and persuaded Joan Baez to play a benefit concert) and dined with Fidel Castro. He once sat across the table from Michael Jackson, and he has traveled with presidential candidates. But his most powerful source of motivation remains the children who face terrible adversities yet dream of becoming paleontologists, artists and marine biologists. Their stories are his springboard for discussing larger policy issues that hinder us from effectively eradicating childhood poverty and overcoming barriers to accessible health care. Persistent deprivation and the avoidable problems that accompany poverty ensnare millions of children and impact the health, prosperity and creativity of the adults they become. Dr. Redlener argues that we must drastically change our approach to meeting the needs of children ― for their sake and to ensure America’s resiliency and influence in an increasingly complex world.
It is Dr. Redlener’s hope that readers will emerge optimistic about our future, with a deeper understanding of how investing in children today will increase our chances of a successful tomorrow. Fighting for our nation’s children is far from a lost cause, and nothing could be more important.
Author Irwin Redlener, M.D., is a pediatrician and founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which works to understand and improve the nation’s capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. In 2020, Dr. Redlener created the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia. He is a public health analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and recently partnered with Cher in CherCares, a new program that assists communities struggling with COVID-19.
Dr. Redlener is also President Emeritus and Co-Founder of the Children’s Health Fund, a philanthropic initiative that he created with singer/songwriter Paul Simon and Karen Redlener to develop health care programs in 25 of the nation’s most medically underserved urban and rural communities. He currently serves as a special advisor on emergency preparedness to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and regularly communicates with leadership in U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, as well as Homeland Security.
He is also the author of Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now. For more information, please visit www.irwinredlener.org.
The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN-10: 0231177577 ISBN-13: 978-0231177573 Available from Amazon.com
Make ‘Go on a Diet’ Resolutions Obsolete with the Whole Person Integrative Eating Program
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What if you never again need to make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight or “go on a diet” because your most-of-the-time way of eating empowers you to eat and weigh less? Original, pioneering research by holistic nutrition researcher Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., and behavioral scientist Larry Scherwitz, Ph.D.—authors of the award-winning Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Breakthrough Dietary Lifestyle to Treat the Root Causes of Overeating, Over-weight, and Obesity—reveals that replacing the complex reasons you overeat— called “over-eating styles”—with the scientifically sound Whole Person Integrative Eating (WPIE) dietary lifestyle (meaning, WPIE is a way of life; it’s not a traditional diet) may make weight-loss resolutions obsolete.
“Now is the time to ‘reset’ and rethink what and how we eat; to replace traditional dieting with a scientifically sound way of eating that lessens overeating and that leads naturally to weight loss, health and healing,” says Kesten.
Kesten and Scherwitz share a simple yet powerful premise: Identify the reasons you overeat (your overeating styles) and gain weight—with the illuminating self-assessment quiz—then overcome overeating and lose weight by replacing your overeating styles with the antidotes: the elements of the Whole Person Integrative Eating program.
By shedding light on the root causes of overeating, Kesten and Scherwitz present a program that empowers readers with a personalized plan, and in turn new hope and new choices to help them reduce overeating, lose weight and keep it off.
WPIE is not a diet that a person goes on … then off. It is a scientifically sound, dietary life-style designed to be practiced for a lifetime.
“If people follow the revolutionary program outlined in this game-changing, insightful book, it may be the most helpful step they can take toward losing weight and keeping it off,” says bestselling author Kenneth Pelletier, M.D., Ph.D., clinical professor of medicine at University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.
The authors’ paradigm-shifting message is that food influences not only the physical dimensions of health, but also our emotional, spiritual and social well-being. Their dietary lifestyle can build bridges between the millions who struggle with overeating and weight issues and the medical community. And it can inspire us all to re-envision our relationships with food, eating and weight, so that each time we eat, we are nourished … for life.
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition researcher, award-winning author and health journalist, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She is also an experienced, expert speaker and presenter—from TV and podcast interviews to large conferences and small-group workshops.
Kesten served as Nutritionist on Dean Ornish, M.D.’s first clinical trial for reversing heart dis-ease through lifestyle changes, the results of which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. She was Director of Nutrition at cardiovascular clinics in Eu-rope and on the Board of Directors of the American Heart Association, San Francisco.
Kesten has published more than 400 nutrition and health articles. Her first book, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul, received the first-place gold award in the Spirituality category from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Whole Person Integrative Eating has been honored with the No.1 gold, best-book award in the Health category by Book Excellence Awards and is a No. 1 Amazon best seller. Kesten is a VIP Contributor at Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, and is married to behavioral scientist and co-author of Whole Person Integrative Eating, Larry Scherwitz, Ph.D.
Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Breakthrough Dietary Lifestyle to Treat the Root Causes of Overeating, Overweight, and Obesity Publisher: White River Press ISBN-10: 1887043543 ISBN-13: 978-1887043540 Available from Amazon.com and integrativeeating.com
Trish Stevens Helen Cook Senior Publicist Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 903.654.0938 Direct hcook@ascotmediagroup.com www.ascotmedia.com
Powerful True Story Inspires Others to Seek Adventure, Turn Each Day into a Gift
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Brittany Moser’s short life was not defined by how she died, but rather, by how she lived each day to the fullest and the profound impact she had on those around her. Brittany died from a rare condition, Addison’s disease, in 2017 at the age of 32. She had been a happy-go-lucky flight attendant, soaring high above reality, when her diagnosis suddenly brought her down to earth.
Rather than buckle under the weight of fear, she chose to be fearless and embarked upon the adventure of a lifetime with her best friend — her father. Free and Fearless: The Amazing Impact of One Precious Life is Brittany’s unforgettable story as told by her father, Philip Moser.
“This book is not about the grief of losing a child, but about making the most out of what we are given and living our lives positively and not out of fear,” Moser writes. “Brittany inspired me, an ordinary farm boy, to explore life, to climb mountains and to write a book.”
Free and Fearless is an honest, poignant account of Brittany’s legacy and the ripple effect that her outlook on life had on everyone who knew her. Philip hopes that by hearing her story, readers will be inspired by Brittany’s contagious spirit and unwavering desire for new adventures and experiences — even in the shadow of an incurable illness.
Among Brittany’s valuable life lessons that Philip shares with readers are:
How precious life is and how we can affect the people around us;
How an open mind and a positive attitude can inspire us to do things we never thought possible;
How to move out of our comfort zones and into a challenging existence that can turn each day into an exciting gift to be explored;
How to not let fear control us, and to use our abilities to seek unique, positive and inspiring adventures;
To embrace change as a natural part of life;
And finally, that we won’t be remembered by our things or our savings accounts, but by how we made other people feel.
“I want to share the same inspiration that I received for 32 years,” Philip added. “In the end, love truly does conquer all, and Brittany wanted us to know that.”
Author Philip Moser grew up on a farm in Angola, Indiana. After high school, he began working in different aspects of the grocery business, a career that continues to this day. He and his wife, Marilyn Wells, raised two incredible daughters, Camille and Brittany.
For more information, please visit www.freeandfearlessbook.com or connect with the author on social media at https://www.facebook.com/philip.moser.73?ref=bookmarks. A portion from the sale of each book will be donated to the National Adrenal Disease Foundation.
Free and Fearless: The Amazing Impact of One Precious Life ISBN-10: 1733086404 ISBN-13: 978-1733086400 Available from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, BooksaMillion.com and other online retailers
Undercurrents of Mortality, Forgiveness Buoy Compelling Coming of Age Story
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For Bill Smith, the end has always been in view. And perhaps, in some metaphysical way, his occasional confrontations with the inevitable end that awaits us all made Bill better equipped to emerge intact from each crisis. His life, in fact, has been a series of highly unlikely extensions. This is his story.
The Home Stretch, from award-winning author Wayne M. Johnston, features everyman Bill Smith (loosely based on Johnston himself), who, throughout his life, is confronted with extraordinary circumstances. His is a coming of age story in which the peace that allegedly comes with maturity is often shunted aside to make room for yet another crisis. It is also an uplifting story in its portrait of a man struggling to find personal integrity through challenging conditions.
From an early age, Bill grapples with depression. Raised in a religious cult, he cannot reconcile his own experience with the worldview of his parents, and although he’s bound to them by love and obligation, he rejects their beliefs. His father’s palpable disappointment in Bill leads him to contemplate suicide and to provoke his father into a confrontation with a surprising outcome that would redefine their relationship and alter the course of both of their lives.
Given to a physical, adventurous life, Bill becomes the chief engineer on a seagoing tugboat, and his tales of weathering gale-force winds and violent storms at sea provide metaphorical undercurrents for his fraught relationship with his father, his failed early marriage, his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s and his own battle with leukemia, which he is told will kill him. Just when Bill has come to believe he has put the worst of it to rest, he learns something more about his father that opens everything up again, except this time, Bill’s sister is the victim.
The Home Stretch is a poignant, ultimately inspiring coming of age story that weaves themes of mortality and forgiveness through life-defining moments of reckoning that many adults have to face head-on and learn to overcome.
Wayne M. Johnston taught English, Creative Writing and Publications at La Conner High School for 19 years. Prior to that, for 22 years he worked on tugboats, usually as chief engineer, towing freight barges between Canadian and West Coast American ports. In 2011, he won the Soundings Review First Publication Award for his essay, “Sailing,” and has published other essays locally. For his debut novel, North Fork, he drew from years of experience reading student journals to reproduce the way kids voice serious matters to a trusted adult. The Home Stretch is book two in a planned trilogy. North Fork was released in 2016 as a YA novel. The story is told through the voices of three 17-year-olds as journal entries for their English class. Bill Smith, the protagonist in The Home Stretch, is their English teacher, and The Home Stretch is his back story.
Johnston lives with his wife, Sally, on Fidalgo Island in Washington State where he is working on another book length project.
The Home Stretch Publisher: Black Heron Press ISBN-10: 1936364344 ISBN-13: 978-1936364343 Available from Amazon.com, BN.com, Target.com and anywhere books are sold
Success Stories Show that Low Dose Naltrexone Helps Many People with Autoimmune Diseases
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Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s, psoriasis, fibromyalgia and other autoimmune conditions affect nearly 23.5 million Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In her thought-provoking book, The Power of Honest Medicine, patient advocate Julia Schopick (with Don Schwartz) outlines a safe, inexpensive, often dramatically effective alternative to the costly, often-toxic treatments that doctors routinely prescribe for autoimmune and other diseases. It’s called Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), and The Power of Honest Medicine is filled with compelling success stories from people all over the globe who have experienced relief from their symptoms thanks to LDN.
“There is lots of evidence that LDN is a groundbreaking treatment for autoimmune diseases, helping many patients with these conditions to achieve remission,” Julia writes. “In some cases, it can slow or stop the progression of their diseases. In many cases, patients experience a life-changing relief of symptoms.”
In spite of its documented benefits, the use of LDN to treat autoimmune conditions remains largely unknown among the medical community and the public. Julia is committed to changing that.
The Power of Honest Medicine contains contributions from 18 people from around the world (the U.S., the U.K. and Europe), all of whom are eager to spread the word about how LDN helped alleviate their symptoms of serious conditions—such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn’s, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and fibromyalgia—when the higher priced, often-toxic medications they had been taking didn’t work. Also, with many of these conditions, the drugs doctors prescribe can cost thousands of dollars a month, compared with LDN, which costs around a dollar a day.
Additionally, The Power of Honest Medicine contains a section dedicated to helping readers understand LDN and why it has the potential to positively impact those suffering from autoimmune disorders. Plus, the book includes a chapter with strategies for helping readers convince their doctors to prescribe LDN—information Julia has been asked for again and again by her readers and by those who have heard her speak.
Ever since her husband’s death from a brain tumor in 2005, Julia has dedicated her life to patient advocacy and to sharing information about potentially lifesaving alternative and off-label medical treatments. Her first book, Honest Medicine, offered valuable insights supported by patient testimonials regarding the use of four underutilized lifesaving treatments: Silverlon, for non-healing wounds; intravenous alpha lipoic acid, for liver disease; the Ketogenic Diet, for epilepsy; and Low Dose Naltrexone, for autoimmune diseases.
Julia’s husband survived 12 years beyond any doctor’s prognosis, and she attributes this to the innovative treatments she uncovered for him. It’s been her passion since then to prevent others from suffering unnecessarily and having to juggle the side effects of toxic medications with the debilitating symptoms of their health conditions.
“I believe that LDN would be the standard of care for autoimmune diseases if Big Pharma didn’t rule doctors’ prescribing decisions,” she adds.
Julia Schopick is the bestselling author of Honest Medicine and her follow-up book, The Power of Honest Medicine. She is a seasoned radio talk show guest who has appeared on over 200 shows and is often invited back. Julia’s goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little-known but promising treatments their doctors may not know about. Julia’s articles have been featured in numerous publications, including American Medical News (AMA), Alternative & Complementary Therapies, the British Medical Journal and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Power of Honest Medicine: LDN, an Inexpensive Alternative to the Costly, Toxic Medications Doctors Prescribe for Autoimmune and Other Diseases Publisher: Innovative Health Publishing ISBN-10: 0982969031 ISBN-13: 978-0982969038 Available from Amazon.com
Trish Stevens Linda Oldman Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 news@ascotmedianews.com ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone
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