I have been to Utah 6 maybe 7 times within a year. Coming from the Bay Area and driving to my destination some three hours northeast of Salt Lake City through what I refer to as an emotional landscape, Utah for many of us has become a confrontation especially when you are summoned.

Once I land in Salt Lake, I have my routine down. The airport is my last chance for a chai latte at Starbucks, I order up a tall for the road then grab some Krispy Kremes, (the olive branch I offer each time for whom I visit), and wrestle with Alamo to make certain the rental car has a satellite radio, then I am off. Leaving the airport, snow-covered jagged mountains only add to the drama seemingly preparing me for what lurks ahead, the wide-mouthed lakes and reservoirs help to calm my sense of urgency, and by the time I reach the high desert in NE Utah I am lost in wonder. Captivated by the light hitting ancient rock formations and the air (the air is spectacular here- it’s so – so – so je n’est quoi – I don’t know –so caressing and mystical in the same moment). It is the wonder that this land exudes that helps sustain me over the next few days.

For those of you who have yet to be apprised Utah is a veritable hot bed for therapeutic wilderness programs and therapeutic schools for our children- mostly young adult teen-agers who in some capacity decided to check out from their families, from school, from life. Disengaged and discouraged many parents as a desperate effort resolve to send their children to Utah, entrusting them to complete strangers with an unfettered sense of hope, a willingness to listen, to comprehend, and to maybe, just maybe, heal.

And as it was/is with me, over a year ago unbeknownst to my son, he was escorted to Second Nature Wilderness Program in the dead of winter shortly after Christmas 2010. Although Second Nature’s main offices are in Salt Lake City, our educational consultant matched my son with their program in Oregon. After spending nearly three months on the eastern side of the Cascades in the dead of winter, he was escorted to his current school in Roosevelt, Utah. (Escorted is an interesting choice of words I know, but when my son recalls this experience he will tell you, his escorts “were cool” and that “wilderness was an awesome experience”)

This is why I now have a slightly endearing relationship with Utah, my son is there.

I find it remarkable that Utah continues to bring many of us so-called progressive thinkers, PC parents, and well, tree-hugging yahoos to their state. Yes, to our disbelief Halliburton is welcomed there and yes they are drilling all over NE Utah’s pristine basin. Holiday Inn Express and Springhill Suites are popping up like McDonalds to accommodate ‘the oil people.’ Utah doesn’t mind, they are reaping the benefits of newly built schools and corporate America, just like Utah doesn’t mind being a safe place for our California kids.

Even more remarkable are the number of youthful therapists with their young families that choose to live in Utah and commit to helping our estranged children. Each therapist I have met is healthy and seems to be actively involved in one of Utah’s outdoor activities – cycling, kayaking, skiing, hiking, mountain climbing, and on it goes.

The Kripsy Kremes are devoured in seconds. My now 15-year-old son looks amazingly fit and healthy. Detoxed from IPhones, texting, World of Warcraft, angry rap music, and “medicinal marijuana” (30% THC- not addicting for our youth – my ass), we acknowledge that we both have changed. He is engaging, safe, and after the parent workshop has earned a 2-day pass with mom.

As far as I can tell most of the workshops center around what triggers us emotionally in ways that cause us to react negatively so that we can become aware of this behavior and obsentibly change unhealthy choices and reactions. They also center on fears –each of our fears, all of them. There is even a fear chart that is required homework for the students. Five maybe as many as seven fears need to be identified, from there looking how one either approaches a fear or avoids their fear ensues. Not your average high school, but these are not your average high school kids either. Any therapeutic boarding school will tell you their students have one quality in common—they are much more sensitive than the average kid and most are more intelligent. The coping skills and tools these kids are getting in Utah are life- changing and I now believe world-changing. Their emotional IQ’s are startlingly high. One can only imagine if a small percentage of the world’s population were taught how to approach their fears and cope with life’s emotional pains what a very different world we would all be experiencing.

There is not much to do in the basin, many therapeutic boarding schools are far removed and a reasonable distance from city life. They are designed that way. Most are out in nature and the idea when visiting is to spend most of your time communicating with your child, no matter how painful, joyful, or challenging. My heart strings are played upon, my buttons pushed, and my authority questioned. This is not easy and when the time comes to drop my son back at his boarding school I fight tears hard. It is always easy to hold them back when he has relapsed into blaming me for where he is, but when a mom sees the progress and catches a glimpse of the son she used to have, there is no stopping them. I try to wait until I get into the car, but in those moments my son sees my pain. It takes more than courage to leave your kid in Utah’s hands; it is an unexpected leap of faith. As I drive away I want so badly to bring him home, make roasted chicken and play dominos. I question my mothering and ruminate on parental decisions of days gone by . . . . . there is no one I want to call, no iTunes I want to listen to, I drive through my emotional landscape and let the magnificence and beauty of Utah surround me. It is not until I reach the outskirts of Salt Lake City that I turn on the radio where Tom Petty is Free Fallin’ and realize I am, too.

Stay true,

M

It is interesting to note that the NYT does not dig deeper to ask why America is rapidly falling behind in the area of drug development – the number of new drugs approved by the FDA decreased dramatically in 2010. Loaded with hypocrisy the piece turns a blind eye to the antiquated system known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Unfortunately, the NYT neglected to report that the pace of research has accelerated beyond the ability of the FDA to keep up with approvals in a timely manner. Even though funding for the FDA has increased in recent years, due to its bureaucratic hurdles and antiquated scientific methods for the review of promising new treatments, the Agency is steadily falling behind the scientific community. Out of the public’s frustration, FDA is being pressured by elected officials to move promising drugs to market faster in order to save lives. Yet the FDA seems to be working overtime to thwart the public’s interest in new drug development.

Current indictments of biotech and pharma executives are a clear example of FDA’s ham-handed effort to slow the progress of the scientific community and new drug development. The reason is that FDA and other government agencies want to increase their control over health care decision making. The FDA cannot regulate the practice of medicine, so, instead, they are increasing their ability to control which drugs get approved – and reimbursed – for diseases that the government approves of. It used to be up the doctor and the patient.

The NYT article misses this undercurrent completely. The article fails to mention that the FDA’s bizarre prosecutions, double standards, and the attempts to politicize the interpretation of medical results, through their own definitions of statistics, has had a chilling effect on our nation’s finest researchers. Ask any doctor why they are happy not to be in research these days. As the government infringes on scientific free speech, scientific organizations, and academic researchers will not be able to – nor will they want to for fear of prosecution – send out their interpretation of study results of a trial for peer review without first gaining approval of the FDA or other government agencies. In effect, FDA’s prosecution of study results is bringing research efforts and scientific free speech to a standstill.

In a recent case sitting before the Supreme Court (Matrixx Initiatives, Inc vs. Siracusano) the FDA and the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote an amicus brief regarding the role of statistical inference testing is assessing the meaningful of clinical study results. Disturbingly, their arguments before the Supreme Court are completely opposite, a full 180 degrees opposite, of the government’s position in a case that is before a Federal Court in northern California (the US vs W. Scott Harkonen).

On the one hand, in the FDA’s arguments to the Supreme Court, they assert that bright-line statistical criteria, such as whether a study result in statistically significant or not, is unimportant. Statistics alone, they argue, do not in any determine the ‘practical’ or clinical significance of study results. In U.S. vs Harkonen, FDA argues just the opposite, declaring that statistical significance is the ‘gold standard,’ and study results that do not meet his arbitrary standard are ‘generally regarded as unreliable.’

Such capricious, arbitrary, and inconsistent legal actions continue to make one wonder if there is a larger political agenda regulating science – like government control of health care decision making – or if this is simply a case of ineptitude. Contemplating this, one almost has to hope it is the latter.
Debate over what we learn from clinical trials is the daily task of our nation’s best medical researchers. As American citizens we expect and demand that this kind of thoughtful exchange occurs in a free and open scientific forum where all of us are committed to achieving the best outcomes for the American public.
Let’s hope the rapid push for a one billion dollar federal drug development center is not a further attempt by the government to gain control over the development of promising new medicines and who will get access to them. And how can we expect that an already failing FDA will provide fair and unbiased oversight of a fellow government agency’s drug development programs? How is that going to work?
Americans need to be asking if the FDA should have take on the role of overseeing our government’s own drug development efforts. It’s the proverbial fox guarding the hen house – except, in this case, the ability of the fox to guard anything, in an unbiased fashion, is in question. Should FDA have control over the publication of factual scientific results? Should the FDA be able to enact into law a standardized methodology for the interpretation of research data? Unfortunately, much of this has already happened.
It is not that drug companies no longer have the will, they simply do not want to face the blatant and bizarre double standards of the FDA’s billion dollar prosecutions.

Stay true,

M

I was catching up with one of my dear friends today and we both confessed to feeling sick after sitting in front of a computer screen for an hour or two. “I admit,” I said, “that if I am sent a long document, I need to print it out in order to read the damn thing because – I cannot sit there for hours and read a screen. And please don’t get me started about e-books- I am dreading the day, I already feel like an environmental terrorist when I hit ‘print’.”
She (an ardent environmentalist – as in 1st person to own an electric car many years ago, on national wildlife preservation boards, and on it goes) replied, “I have the same thing, there is an entire population of people who feel this way.”
“Really,” I responded with more than a sigh of relief. Thrilled to know that I am not the only one whose body demands I remove myself from electronic communications.
Stay true,

For those of you who don’t know, my 14 year old son was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm last month, saying life has changed is a bit of an understatement for us and yes a box of jello helped to bring some sanity into my life.  It took me a few days to make the damn fake raspberry gel and then it sat in the fridge for another few days before my stomach hurt so bad that it called out to me.  Soothe my tummy it did. I ate it for breakfast one day and dinner for another, it allowed me to sort through thoughts, create some order out of the recent chaos and thankfully eat something.

*****************************************************************

About a week ago I noticed that I haven’t been driving around with the radio on or my iphone plugged in, I guess there are too many thoughts roaming my mind and I need the quiet only car rides bring.  The thought that visits me the most is the UCSF hospital policy of consent.  I don’t know why University hospitals have this consenting policy for 14 year olds, I had this notion that if young animals where made to attend a consenting meeting– there were be millions of people protesting this cruelty,  but not so true for our youth .  As if they are not wounded enough with absentee parents and divorce, the consenting policy is just one more opportunity to mis-manage the mind of a teen.  Let me explain a bit further here– I am the adult, however, this particular hospital insisted the details of a cerebral angiogram be described to my son (a minor). Angiograms are no picnic, they are the gold standard of brain tests and are approximately a 2-3 hour procedure, whereby one is put to sleep.  At the meeting my son looked faint, but powered on.  As scheduled, the next morning he bravely walked into radiology, got into his hospital gown and was left alone in a tiny room waiting.  The wait was growing a bit long, when he walked out announcing he was not going to go through with this.  He elaborated that he did not want to be put under and have a catheter running through his arteries stopping just above his neck whereby doctors would begin to shoot dye into his brain for imagining.  Information overload for a frightened teen already anxious about his health.  There were no sedatives administered to help him, only a few kind nurses tried to talk him into going through with this.  At 6’1” his mind was made up, maybe next year he thought he could get a cerebral angiogram.  The anesthesiologist standing by agreed that the consenting policy for minors was over the top ridiculous- he said there are many adults who don’t want to know what procedures entail, so why do we need to subject our kids to this? When I later confronted the neurologist about this he mumbled something about Nuremberg . . . . . hmm. When I told a doc friend about this he replied, “Can we just stop here, can’t we do better for our children?”  As a doc the entire incident upset him greatly.

Bedside manners seem to have all been tossed out with our health care plans of which I reminded UCSF in a stern, but jello- felt moment email to their neurology department. My son now has a new neurologist who seems to understand the complexities of teen-agers.  She asked us to be a part of a research study, starting out with a higher quality MRA.  This may not give them all the info they need, but her plan is to enlist his trust and ease him into the challenges and concerns of an aneurysm which due to the type and location, may or may not be treatable.  Meantime we wait—peach jello anyone?

Stay true,

M

Stay true,

M

*RIP Eight Belles—you must have been a true beauty.

“By-the-way, I asked my waiter, do you have any anchovies?”  “No, I don’t think so,” was his reply.  But lucky for me, one of the chefs came out of the kitchen for a moment (must have been to drink in some spring) and my waiter asked him if they had any anchovies in the kitchen.  “Yes”, beamed the chef (he recognized an anchovy fan).  When the Cesar arrived it was topped off with a heaping pile of anchovies, which I promptly popped a few into my mouth, and then I picked up the large leafs of romaine with my fingers, sipped my wine and completely enjoyed myself.

As I was leaving, life felt better.  No former husband to complain about me eating garlic or anchovies that is one plus.  Beauty abounds us here in wine country, which is another plus and on it went-until all the plusses elevated my spirits up to a flowering plum kind of celebration.

As I walked to my car three gorgeous men were walking directly into my path. Hard not to notice one was a Clint Eastwood rugged-type with curly, dark hair.  And they stopped to ask me, if my little restaurant was a good one.  “Very good,” I replied—“this is Sonoma County, most of these restaurants are fabulous with sustainable local produce on their menus and killer boutique wines by the glass.”

To which Clint Eastwood smiled big and said, “Is that what I am smelling?”  “I smell something delicious.”  Ears beginning to burn, I threw my hand across my mouth and noted, “That would be me, I just ate a ton of anchovies on top of an extra garlicky Cesar salad.”

“Would you like to join us for a glass of wine?” he asked.

Hmmm-a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.  Who knew a few seemingly inconsequential anchovies could revive the promise of spring . . . . .

Stay true,

M

No fool to clues of burn out, I promptly took a walk in the rain breathed in the negative ions, allowed myself to become awestruck by the lingering fog and for a moment felt better.  Still when I walked into my office, I could not get my body to settle down in front of my ‘screen’.  So I built a fire, made a cup of tea, and decided I was going to unplug for a day or so.

Which as you know is not so easy.   To unplug- or to disconnect these days requites a bit of effort.   AT&T, etc market themselves by keeping us all connected—‘all around the world’.  What I am wondering though is —- what staying connected means or translates to ‘all around the world’.  One might like to think that staying connected has overtones of caring—of keeping in touch with ones values, sense of self, friends, family, belief systems, and if you will to-god.  Staying connected not so long ago was something we did to keep us whole, nurtured—and sane. Staying connected did not translate to connecting to a ‘screen’-no matter how flat, thin, or skinny.

About the only ones advocating we disconnect from our ‘screens’ is Kaiser Permanente—everyone I speak to agrees—their ads rock.  Why? Because in the name of health and healthy lifestyles Kaiser continually suggests we turn off our screens—we disconnect, we manage our stress, become nutritionally and emotionally aware of our choices, and generally spend some time reflecting on how best to take care of oneself—all significant keys to maintaining health.  Finally, a health care model that understands the key to our current health care crisis is prevention.  (Take note that prevention requires awareness and balance.)  With thoughts of health care systems focusing on prevention then might it be a good idea for us to start looking at ways in which we can all disconnect and focus on bringing our lives back into balance—re-connecting to that which truly matters?

Stay true,

M

RAVES   (M’s Best of the Best)
Champagne: Krug, Brut 1996
Sparkling Wine:  Schramsberg Brut Blanc de Noirs 2003
Pinot: Halleck & Sons 2005
Grenache: Jeff RunquistWines 2006
Malbec: Chateau St. Jean 2004
Grappa: Mazzatti di Altavilla Le Rose
Marguerita: Barn Diva, Healdsburg
Restaurant: Ravenous, Healdsburg
Sushi Ran, Sausalito
Chocolate: La Dolce V
Tomatoes:  Tiger-Striped Heirlooms from Sol Food Farm
Smile: Shea Breaux Wells (new CD coming soon)
Sir Richard Branson 
Jazz /JazzExperience:  Patricia Barber performing to a very intimate audience, Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Barn Diva
Club:  The Forge, Miami
Party: Jean’s Pajama Party, Eldorado Kitchen. Sonoma
Foundation:  SEVA
Film: Juno
Painter:  Kim Lordier (fantastic Norcal pastels)
Theater: sad to say didn’t get much in this year- heard Coast of Utopia and Rock and Roll both by Stoppard are fantastic
Speech: Chairman Dana Gioia Stanford’s 2007 Commencement Speech

RANTS
“You finished?” What’s up with five-star restaurants rushing over to take your plate just as you place the last bite into your mouth? Don’t they have enough dishes in the kitchen?  
“I will call you back just as soon as I can” As heard on one too many VM’s UGHHH yes we know how very important you are and that meeting with your endless lists of senior VP’s will take 3 months at least
The New Gateway Drug Highly addictive, extremely violent online adventure games targeting our youth, especially boys who have been found to play for hours, days, weeks at a time alone in their bedrooms.
Sebastopol, CA The community is PCing themselves into the dead zone of indignant stagnation and misdirected hostility (makes one want to light up a cig on Main Street)
Not Giving Money to Homeless People Do we really think that by not giving them a $1 or $5 that this will help?
Hearing the N word from Anyone Rappers included, it just plain hurts
Fake Floral Bouquets Are they really sent as gifts?

Last week I was talking to a dear male friend, married for like 30 some years who posed the question, ‘Maggy what is wrong with these guys?”  He had just met one of my gorgeous friends in LA who was well, single and before that had two calls from friends of his in NY who are, well single and then there is me.  He is perplexed and it was I who had to inform him that we fabulous single women have reached epidemic levels.  Not that this is any news to available men out there, but it was to him.  He had difficulty fathoming why all these exceptional women are, well on their own.

Not that any of us consciously chose this.  We duty date and give it a go putting the past behind us.  But is it a woman’s fault that so many men today are a combination of indecision and separation—lacking genuine passion and ever-so fearful of the C word (commitment)?  I think so.  Why should the new fusion of men have to do much at all when on any given day, they can be so easily gratified?

Until women learn that it is their job to set the standard and teach whoever, wherever how they want to be treated, we lose.  And it seems we are losing big, as our hybrid men suffer from the confusion of instant gratification-another day, week, month, year goes by—each of us relinquishing the need, the wonder and the beauty of authentic intimacy.  What we are left with is the cross pollination of feelings that pale in comparison to, well my image of a cowboy.

Stay True,

M

Obviously I am not referring to the authentic breast cancer organizations like Susan B Komen, Avon, etc- I am referring to companies who claim to align themselves with being pink for one month.  Hopefully for each pink product there is a CEO who understands that beautiful women in all shapes, ages, and sizes everywhere are loosing beautiful breasts; nature’s most symbolic of all things feminine and nurturing.  Hopefully they have considered the single mom who now has to shuffle work, motherhood, and her treatments-who when she has a moment, turns on the television and sees an ad for pink M & M’s.  Hopefully the marketing department asks themselves would this mom be encouraged or infuriated by our pink product.  Hopefully these brainchildren of pink truly care and hopefully they have been told that 65% of all breast cancers happen in the left breast.  The left side of our bodies accepted as the feminine/receptor side of our bodies—and the left breast closest to our heart.  The heart in so many women bruised, closed, and hurting.

Perhaps by addressing this fact, the pink parade will somehow translate their consumer fluff into joy.  Pink products will be designed with the sole concept of bringing joy, for what women need most during recovery is the best heart-healer of all – the belief in and the experience of joy.  No strings attached complete and pure – JOY.

Stay True,

M