Wednesday, April 23: Joshua and I flew from West Palm Beach to Atlanta Hartsfield yesterday. I picked up a rental car at the airport and drove straight to the house of my sister, Jenna. She’s married but doesn’t have children, so she was thrilled to don the role of “Aunt Jenna” to Joshua and look after him while I got some things done in the Atlanta area. In the late afternoon, I hopped over to Natural Foods Warehouse in Alpharetta and did a seminar, which I was pleased with.
This morning, the TV crew and I did a taping at Progressive Medical Centers of America. They are doing a 100-person pilot study of Perfect Weight America in their clinic, and I went there to get an update on how the study is progressing. (We don’t have preliminary results on the entire group just yet.) Our film crew interviewed the coordinating physician, and I spoke with the founder and managing director of Progressive Medical Centers about integrative medicine, natural healing, and natural health. I also did a segment on saunas and traditional cooking. Progressive Medical Centers also have a wonderful woman there who teaches healthy living classes. The particular class we dropped in on was about how to make aloe vera juice from your backyard aloe vera plants.
No rest for the weary; maybe I could have used a tall glass of aloe vera juice because from Progressive Medical Centers, I drove over to Life Grocery & Café in Marietta to do a seminar, which was like homecoming week for me. Life Grocery & Café started out as a coop back in 1976 when students at nearby Life Chiropractic College—hungry for bulk natural foods—founded it. Two of the founders happened to be . . . my parents.
I was two years old when we moved to Marietta so that Dad could attend Life Chiropractic College, and we lived there for several years until we moved to South Florida. Just being around Marietta brought back warm memories for me, which made the afternoon very enjoyable for me.
Meanwhile, the PWA film crew dropped by the medical practice of Fiona Blair, M.D., a pediatrician and my co-author for another book that released last January, “The Great Physician’s Rx for Children’s Health.” At her ABC Pediatric Group medical practice in Stone Mountain, an eastern suburb of Atlanta, the film crew taped her seeing patients and interviewed her as well.
Dr. Blair is a Harvard and Emory University-trained pediatrician who has an oversized heart for treating heavyset children whose poor nutrition and minimal exercise have contributed to a variety of ills. She’s appeared numerous times on CNN’s Headline News as a medical expert whenever the topic of childhood obesity makes the news, which, unfortunately, is quite often these days.
She’s on the front lines of the childhood obesity epidemic, which is ravaging the health of our youngsters. She’s seeing things in 10-year-old children that she didn’t see much when she started out: type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. She said it breaks her heart because these are medical conditions that these poor kids will have to deal with for the next 60 or 70 years, if they live that long . . . and some won’t. Either way, those kids are talking decades of seeing doctors routinely, taking medications, and dealing with a decrease in their quality of life.
Dr. Blair says that the unfortunate thing about modern medicine is that she doesn’t have time to sit and counsel patients. Many times, she wishes she had 45 minutes or an hour to educate parents and their children about how to eat right or the importance of after-school exercise, but HMOs and insurance companies will not pay for that. An op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled, “The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes,” pretty much sums up where health care is these days.