​Here are my planned concluding remarks for "Forward Motion" with Karen Allyn, being taped September 11. I will post dates, times and channels as soon as I know them. If you miss the show, don't worry--MCTV re-runs everything many times . . .

​This Saturday, Aug 25, 2012, I will be giving a talk about my new book Medical Myths Doctors Believe at Books-A-Million in Bethesda, but I will not be allowed to sell the book in the store and the store will not carry the book for sale. Why? because Medical Myths is a print-on-demand book published by Amazon. The parent company of Books-A-Million has decided that their stores, as a policy, will not carry print-on-demand books.

​Scene. A call-in radio talk show in which an interviewer questions a thoughtful, qualified guest. People speaking fifth grade English call in. "Uh, I believe that… " yak yak. The interviewer asks the caller to formulate an actual question for the guest. They never do. Their opinion is baseless, usually irrelevant and always unoriginal. You'd rather listen to the guest.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "All men are created equal."  He surely did not mean the statement literally. He meant "equal before the law", or maybe "entitled to equal opportunity". But even if he meant it literally, he would have conceded that men don't remain equal.

My approach has continued to evolve. At this point I'm not as focused on weight-loss as I used to be. I want my patients to lose some weight, but more than that, I want them to stop thinking like Americans. If they continue to be materialistic and distracted, there is no way they will keep weight off, no way they'll be happy.

​Some of my friends have accused me of being a socialist, which is of course completely accurate and perceptive. And they wonder how I could possibly be one after the fall of Communism, to which I reply that Communism didn't fall. In the Soviet Union then and in China now, a wealthy class of party-members exploits the workers. Uh, that's not what Karl Marx proposed. I bet my friends never read the Communist Manifesto. If they ever do, they should read the new annotated version by Phil Gasper, especially pages 93-117 "Is the Manifesto Still Relevant?"