Causes Worth Carrying On with Diana Gifford-Jones

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If you'd like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that, Diana McKay writes under the pen name Diana Gifford-Jones. She is the daughter of W. Gifford-Jones MD, a storied Canadian doctor who recently passed away at the age of 101. The apple didn't fall far from the tree and Diana is now carrying on weekly health columns that her father first started writing over 50 years ago. Her master's degree at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government is in public policy.

She has published a book on the natural health philosophy of W. Gifford-Jones called No Nonsense Health Naturally. Welcome, Diana.

Diana MacKay: Hello, Richard.

Thanks for having me. I wasn't going to say something about Giff, but we'll talk a lot about him. I still hear his voice. We did enough shows together that I still hear him, especially when I read even your columns. I still hear that undertone of his voice and his personality.

Diana MacKay: I just listened to his voice again when I repeated one of the episodes I did with you and him together and it was nice to hear his voice again, I can say. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And a couple of clarifying questions for us. Why the pseudonym W. Gifford-Jones?

Diana MacKay: That's a good story. He was writing his first book in 1969. It was published, so probably in 1968 or thereabouts, the year I was born, incidentally. And he asked the, you know, as was common practice back then for doctors that were publishing material for a lay audience, they'd run it by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. And the college told him at that time that he could not write the book and publish it under his name because it was considered advertising for patients, which in Ontario and Canada's public system was not allowed. And so in the course of a, you know, sort of a demoralized dinner with his father, talking about how it was such a shame that he couldn't publish the book, his father was the one that came in the idea to use a pseudonym. And he went back to the college and said, you know, if I use a pseudonym, would that be allowed?

And they said, can't stop you from doing it? And he was a maverick of his own, right? So he said, oh, well, then I'm going to do it. And he published his first book under the name W. Gifford-Jones because he liked the sound of that name. He thought it sounded like the kind of name the Queen's gynecologist would have. And so he adopted the name W. Gifford-Jones. His first book was a success and his second book was a huge success and the name stuck as he continued with his book writing and then subsequently his column.

TalkToMeGuy: I would concur with him about that. The image I had before I saw Doc is the sort of, that is that sort of jaunty gentleman with a cane. Walking into the St. Francis in San Francisco is something, it was just that kind of visual. There is something about the W. Gifford-Jones. Like, oh, that's Dr. W. of course. It's perfect.

Diana MacKay: Just perfect. Yeah, and the look matched the name. He had a lot of silver-white hair from a young age. And so he kind of pulled it off pretty beautifully, I think.

TalkToMeGuy: And with that, would you talk about how you're feeling about taking this on?

Diana MacKay: Yeah, yeah, taking this on. We have to be really clear about what I'm taking on. Yeah. You know, I think I just didn't want to let that go. You know, but I guess there's a little bit more to the story. I started writing with him six years ago. And that was a bit of an accident because I was watching him on occasion using his computer to send off his column to, you know, the 50 editors that he would send it to each week. And my mother was also assisting in that process. And at that point, my father was what, 95 years of age or so? And my mom, not, well, 10 years, nine years or so behind him, you know, it's not easy for it. It's not easy, you know, to manage the computer systems and the changing technology all the time.

And there were always challenges about that. So I asked my father if I could help him. And as I began to help him, I realized that, you know, I was getting more and more involved in the nature of what he was writing and the ideas he was trying to share. And I was having fun with him, you know, and I said, Dad, why don't we actually write this together? And that became a real fun, you know, kind of weekly activity that we shared.

And over the past six years, you know, I really got into it in a big way and wanted to continue it when he passed away. So I am going to rate the column. But I'm doing it with a lot of trepidation because he was a doctor and a Harvard Medical School graduate at that and a surgeon and had a long career and a lot of experience with writing the column. And I'm not a doctor. And I'm a graduate of Harvard, sure, but from the Kennedy School of Governments and Public Policy School. So my challenge is not so much in the writing part.

My challenge is in ensuring that the readers understand that I'm not a doctor and that they need to sort of interpret the column in that light as an expert of a different kind. You know what I mean?

TalkToMeGuy: Mm hmm. But it is interesting. Well, like you said, you worked with him for six years, helping with technology, but that you have a, I've read a bunch of your columns. You do have a similar style. I don't know why I say that, but it just is a certain texture to the writing that is similar to what the previous columns.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, laughing because if you go back, you know, it's true. And certainly over the past six years, it would make sense because we're collaborating and, you know, right. But my father was it was a, you know, a bit of a rabble rouser.

No. From the earliest days that he started writing his column, he started writing it because he was frustrated that women was gynecologist women coming into his office didn't understand how their body worked. And they were asking questions that, you know, he figured an educated person should know. And, and so he really, you know, started out writing about, you know, explaining procedures and explaining medicine and sort of helping people understand what they need to be thinking about. And he, and he did have a style that was, you know, very, very easy for people to come along with and he didn't speak like a doctor. He didn't write like a doctor. He wrote like, you know, a member of your family or somebody you'd meet on the street and people comment on that very frequently when they write in they say, you know, one of the things we really, really appreciate about your father is that he doesn't talk down to us.

And he talks to us and with us. And my dad did a really good job of that and I'm not sure I've got the same knack for it at all. I try. I'm actively trying to be, you know, evidenced by the readers as, as, as Dr. Gifford Jones' daughter, I want them to feel that. But I think he was a lot better at, and if you go back and read the older columns which are posted on our website, you can see the difference. He's, he's not, he's not, he doesn't like grammar, you know, never really paid much attention to grammar.

I do. And he, he was very funny, you know, and I don't have the same wit that he had. And again, I'm working at it and I'm trying to replicate that as much as I can. And I'm working hard on having an opinion, because that was another thing my father felt really strongly about. So he wanted to be sure that he was sharing something, you know, with a voice that was not sitting on the fence, not, not saying here are some issues and, you know, we got to look at this side and look at that side and I'm not going to really tell you anything. He came down with an opinion, was an opinion column. And another, another quick story I'll tell you about, you know, an opinion column was that on one occasion, I discovered recently in going through a, through some of his papers, a reader that he had, you know, another reader, actually a fellow over in the UK that he had interviewed. I'm probably a few months back, you know, prior to writing the actual column, he'd interviewed this fellow. And then he published a column about it and he put a quote in from this doctor that he'd interviewed in the UK. And the doctor clearly hadn't remembered the interview, and he wrote saying something along the lines of, you know, you're, you're misrepresenting me, and, and you're misrepresenting, you know, the facts of the matter here, and I challenged my father on that and, and I saw in the paperwork that my father wrote back, and and indeed, it had gone to the, I don't know if it was the College of Physicians and Surgeons or the Ontario Medical Association or someplace like that this fellow in the UK had sort of complained. And my father wrote back saying, you know, I interviewed you and the best of my ability I've got my notes that's what you said, but on the matter of whether this is, you know, factual or not, this is my view. And the authorities, the regulatory bodies in Canada also backed up my father saying, you know, you're, we expect doctors to have a perspective, you know, that's what they're trained to do to have a perspective, and they may not always have the same perspective or a uniform perspective, but we do encourage our physicians to have a view. And, and that's what my father did and I think that really came through in his column over the years as well and it's another piece I'm trying to pick up on.

TalkToMeGuy: Mm hmm. And I was going to say this for later but it brings to mind he took on the use of heroin in palliative or actually in pain management even I mean he, he took it on I don't remember that when that was, but I know from talking in previous shows that he did. Mm hmm. And it seemed like a, now I'm mostly used to bad phrase, a brave act. Yeah. You know, for a, for a medical doctor to talk about it in a positive light. I agreed, I agree with him. But it was like, wow.

Diana MacKay: Could you talk about that? Yeah, you know, heroin is one of those things and that sort of taboo. It's a problem drug. And to advocate for it. It was 1977 was, you know, advocate for it in Canada where it was illegal on the street and in medical practice anywhere. And my father had seen its use in the UK for treating cancer patients. And you have to remember this was back when we didn't have such fancy pain pumps or patches that now deliver the drug much more consistently over time, small, small, small doses at a time. But back then you were injecting the drug using a needle and a syringe, you know, and, and morphine, the drug that was being used required a fairly significant injection and hurt, you know, and it was a pain upon pain and didn't relieve the cancer pain as effectively as heroin did, which required a much smaller injection. And so, yeah, he advocated for that.

And he did advocated in the column and invited readers across Canada to share their opinions on what he was pushing for. And the letters came in, you know, and we had 20,000 of them sitting on our dining room table. And I remember pouring through them. I was, what, nine or so at the time. And it was the first time, Richard, that I remember actually crying because my soul hurt, you know, like reading those letters was like, just absolute. It was terrible, you know, letter after letter written by somebody who had lost somebody in pain.

And you knew there was, you know, here was my dad arguing that there was a better way and, you know, I, you know, how could a little girl like me not look up to that, you know, the fight that he was putting on and with amazing big eyes and so proud of him and he did manage to get heroin legalized for terminal cancer patient care in Canada. Wow.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. Wow. I had a friend who is the head nurse for a posse on the boundary peninsula back in the day when I had the herb store. And she wanted me to work with her.

I had already known her. Just socially, but we ended up talking and she wanted me to work on some suppositories, including this is a long time ago, cannabis when cannabis was really illegal. And to work on some suppositories using some cannabis and some other herbs that I thought would be effective that patients would be able to use themselves for their pain management. And she was they she was thrilled because she could actually help people in pain. And they were able to administer many of them were able to administer the suppositories to themselves.

So they were when they were in a pain cycle, they could just slide that in and get some relief. So I'm I'm very much in the kindred spirits of cancer pain world. And it's, I almost said gnarly, but I can't help it. It's gnarly. I mean, it is, it is stunning how it can bring, you know, big, burly grown men to their knees with pain.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, pain was a theme that my father focused on a lot. And I'll continue that too. I'm going to have a lot of learning to do. But it is interesting, isn't it that, you know, something that seems so simple as, you know, how can you turn off the pain has befuddled us to this day, and we still have problems managing pain.

TalkToMeGuy: And are there countries where is the UK still does they still do they still use heroin for pain management?

Diana MacKay: You know, it's a good question. I don't I don't know, you know, the, the, the, the, you know, the science and the, the way pain is managed is evolved so much that I, I don't know if there's I'm sure they're not doing it the same way they were then in any case. Yeah, I know that pain pack, you know, these patches that are being used to manage painter, and you've just mentioned suppositories, you know, self care. But in a hospital setting when you're dealing with cancer patient that's, you know, sedated and so on. I suspect they have, I would like to think they have better, better methodologies now. I don't know.

TalkToMeGuy: I was also my mother died of metastasized cancer. And I was with her during the last several weeks. And I knew the doctor personally, because I'd worked with different on different projects in a different world with her. And so I gave her the thumbs up of like, give her as much morphine as you think is appropriate. Keep her, because that's all we had, really.

And I couldn't sneak in suppositories into the hospital because that could have gotten her in big trouble and I didn't want to do that. And so the morphine did as much as it could, but it just kept her sort of in the veil, that gray veil. Whereas other kinds of, you know, I don't know about heroin, but I know cannabis suppositories can take them to a out of pain, still, you know, the pain is counterbalanced. And then you're able to actually have a little bit of consciousness and awareness, whereas the morphine just puts you into sort of a gray area. That's from my observation.

Diana MacKay: But think about all the people who are, whether they're young or old, but particularly the people as they age, you know, develop some kind of chronic pain. And my father had that too. And, you know, his, his, his, the source of his pain was a, you know, some curvature of the spine that compressed, I'm sure, nerves or something like that. But, but even people who are just dealing with pain of any kind, you know, it's so debilitating. And I wish there was something that we could do to, you know, find additional ways to manage pain because if people didn't have chronic pain, how much better could they expect their lives to be, you know. And I guess we're making some, some progress here and there, but I'm not sure it's, it's a, it's much progress as we make another theme my father worked on his entire life, and which is so true is that people are not leading healthy lives. And so they're developing all kinds of problems that they, they, they need to have developed and, and that's leading to chronic pain problems too.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, I've always said of inflammation, pre-serious pain stage, but inflammation as a biomarker of sending out a signal like, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, notices, notices, notices now. And as you, you know, when we tend to ignore that, oh, that's swollen, that'll go away.

I don't feel that bad. And it's like, no, it's the body sending a signal, sending us a hint, maybe back up, back away from the five pound bag of pita chips from Costco. I'm not picking on Costco. I'm not picking on pita chips. I'm just saying.

Diana MacKay: So, yeah, so where do you see the best sources of information for people about, you know, effective remedies? You know, they go to their doctors and they get prescribed pills, which, you know, I don't think that's the best scenario for people often.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, I've been hanging out with people from the Ortho-Milokita Medicine Society for decades. So I have that in my quiver of knowledge. I knew the founder of the San Francisco branch, Richard Coonan, who was an MD who started the first Ortho-Milokita Society in San Francisco. And I've also interviewed Dr. Levy a number of times.

And so I have that in my arsenal of, you know, when I want to refer people to something, I often send them to their information and talk about things like high dose vitamin C, which we'll talk about. Actually, we'll talk about it now. Because there's that. And then also, I do have a degree as a master herbalist.

So I also have those contacts in the world. Or people like, no, we're not going to talk about vitamin C quite yet, that Paul Stamets, the founder of Fungi Perfecti, who's a mycology researcher who has their medical abstracts on what he did with turkey tail mushrooms. His mom developed breast cancer, a small lump in her breast, I believe, but it was defined as cancer. And one of the things that Paul did was come up with an extract for her of turkey tail. And it indeed did clear out that cancer. So she was cancer free. And there are now medical abstracts on turkey tail. So and he does a lot of other, not just health, I mean, he does things in the world of remediating oil spills and all sorts of stuff.

But I mean, there are a lot of leading thinkers out there, or even Andrew Weil, MD, who's a doctor of Western medicine, but also had a school or had a school, I'm not sure which, in maybe New Mexico, teaching alternative kind of types of thinking, more of a functional medicine practitioner. I think, because I've been, I've been doing this show for almost, let's just say 12 years, anything longer than that. And then before that I did four years of terrestrial radio. So I've been talking to people who are thought leaders in the field of how about, or what if, or let's try this, or, you know, while we were talking backstage about water designing ozone systems, water purification ozone systems. And part of what I learned is that I had previously done research in Mexico with a group. And the reason that we went to Mexico to do the research was because at that time it was illegal for doctors use ozone to do care for a patient. Now it's not illegal, maybe? I'm not actually sure.

It's always a gray area. But in Europe they use ozone a lot, not in a dissimilar way of the idea of high dose vitamin C IVs. And you can use it to stimulate the immune system. Or there was a doctor here whose name I won't use because he already got in trouble who was invited to go to Africa when Ebola was first happening. And he went there and trained the doctors how to give themselves or have their fellow practitioners give them ozone injections to help boost their immune system so they wouldn't get Ebola.

So they had super strong immune systems. And there's a lot of people in other countries using ozone IV, as I say, in a very similar way to where you would use high dose vitamin C where you'd be giving them maybe 30 grams of vitamin C in an IV over three hours. You can do a similar thing with ozone.

The trick with ozone, it has to be produced locally, meaning you can't encapsulate ozone in any way, period. You just cannot. You have to produce it and use it. And so you can do the same thing, but you have to kind of know what you're doing because it can be not toxic, but it can be, they define it as toxic, but it can be super irritating to the mucus membranes. And so you just have to take care when you're using it. And you have to keep in mind that you're dealing with an invisible gas. So it's a little scary when a nurse practitioner or a doctor injects your arm with a needle that looks to be empty.

There's that. But ozone has a lot of, there are a lot of different, whether it's, and also I would also talk about acupuncture. I think acupuncture in this country is still a sleeper because it has so many benefits. Well, this will, okay, this will lead us into, I was going to go somewhere else, but we're going to then talk about your book, that for me, acupuncture is a, can be an urgent care situation, but it's also a tonic, meaning long, that's an herbal term. Tonic is a long-term beneficial effect, meaning like the classics are ginseng, that's a classic one for females, it's Dongkwai, similar characteristics, but different angles. And so there are herbs, there are lots of herbs that have tonic effect.

And I feel that same way about acupuncture. If you have a stress condition, well actually this bounces back and forth. If you have a condition, you have stress.

If you have stress, you're going to open yourself, I feel, more to having a condition because this system is already stressed out and immunosuppressed. So I think one of the benefits of acupuncture, and I've had it for everything from brown recluse spider bites to bad leg cramps, is that it's a good practitioner can go to the meridian point and stimulate that energy channel to either release energy or to get more energy into it. And so I think acupuncture is still a sleeper, even though it's been in use for thousands of years practically.

Diana MacKay: And I can tell you from my own personal experience, I've had one absolutely fantastic experience with acupuncture when I was pregnant with my first child and I had hyperemesis gravitarum, I was losing weight and I got down to 117 pounds. Wow. Yeah, my doctor said, you know, you have got to stop losing weight and start gaining weight. And she said, you know, why don't you try acupuncture, because I was having a hard time, you know. And yeah, I did. And I felt better, you know, I felt better. And since then, I haven't done it again, but I'd love to. And I have also really enjoyed reflexology, I have to say.

Just taking all the, you know, we call it stress or the weight of the world or just, you know, it's hard to define what it is that's being relieved, but some things being very much relieved. And I, you know, if I were a doctor, I would recommend people try these things. They're not expensive, you know, compared to the kinds of things people spend a lot of money on. It's a good investment if you've got some health insurance that covers it all the better. Don't, don't miss the opportunity to give it a try.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, and there are, and then we'll get back to this. I think there's some interesting, there's some interesting work being done using the acupuncture points or meridians at least. And then for laypeople, you can use LED lights, high intensity LED lights to stimulate those points.

So I think the vector for me personally is that acupuncture points, red light therapy. Absolutely. And I think it's something you can do at home now. I could do it now. I could reach out and now and grab a red light device and be poking on my hoku point, which is that web place and between your thumb and finger, which is a bladder meridian and also overall cheese to me later. And so I could jam that into my thumb while we're talking if I wanted to.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I read light therapy is another sort of, it's hard for the late audience to understand what's going on there. But the way you sort of described it makes good sense and I think if you do sit down and read some of the literature about it, it's not, it's not all that complicated. It's, it's, you know, you do need a little bit of expertise if you're going to take it in treatment for one condition or another that you know you're using the right level of penetration and so on and so forth to hit the right spots. But it does, what does it do Richard it just sort of stimulates the cells is it?

TalkToMeGuy: It stimulates the cells. It was the founder of allergy research group that discovered and this is a long time ago that he discovered this, that the red light actually stimulates the mitochondria, at least more topically. You can't, it'll only pierce so far into the system. I've actually used, I took a training, a different kind of training, but that this particular doctor had a laser red light therapy that was actually a registered medical device. He was part of the beta study. And I'm surprised more people aren't using those because that will actually penetrate more deeply into the tissue.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, sports athletes, you know, they're using it all the time now. Right. Right. So it's the same objective you're trying to improve performance, right?

TalkToMeGuy: Right. And you can even use it. Well, the bigger things, the sort of belt like things that you can strap on. So if I had pain in my thigh, or if I was a football player, they always tried to make me a football player because I'm a body type, but I like don't care. But if you have pain in the thigh, you could strap that onto your thigh and wear it for like a half an hour. As you can't, you're not going to really hurt yourself with red light therapy. That's one of the things I like about it. And unlike a trained acupuncturist, you can be a little sloppy.

Excuse me. If you have the general area of where you think that acupuncture point is, you can see if you get into the area, probably the light is going to be sloppy enough in a good, in a beneficial way to have good effect on the surrounding tissue as you go to the point. So I think very, I think nothing but good of red light therapy.

Diana MacKay: I do too. And my father used it and my mother uses it and I can see the effect, you know, it's working. Right.

TalkToMeGuy: Okay, so now this makes me laugh every time I read it about your no-nonsense health. Naturally, you say that preventative health isn't glamorous. So let's talk about the unglamorous world of preventative health and your and the book No Nonsense Health Naturally, which is a great read.

Diana MacKay: Well, it's so it's so so boring being healthy really, isn't it? Yeah. No one has any fun, but that's not entirely true because we could talk a little bit about alcohol too. My father's philosophy was all things in moderation. You can have a little bit of fun, of course, and he really was a huge proponent of having a drink at the cocktail hour each day, and preferably with your lifetime partner or friends, do it socially. The effect of relaxing the arteries every day, I could have it far outweighs the minuscule risk of developing cancer, say, which some research studies are now warning everybody off every touch of alcohol, and that's truly boring, I think. But the rest of the message from my dad has always been start early, adopt healthy practices in life, and the earlier you start them, the better, and the longer you keep them, the happier you're going to be as an older person when you are living with the effects of aging, which we can't avoid. Although there's some interesting research coming out now too about turning off the aging action, so we'll see how that goes, but for now we're still all aging, and there's going to be consequences to that, so you have to prepare early in life to give yourself the best chance of the aging well.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, and I concur with you about the, I think it's the idea of not aging. Okay, part of it is appealing, and yet I just think at some point it's going to, I don't want to say end badly, but that's what comes to mind.

It just seems like we are, for hundreds of years, thousands of years, we have aged. So the idea of stopping it, I mean, I can totally advocate for, well, like your dad as a role model, 101 is pretty long. That's pretty darn healthy. My grandmother lived to be 106. So the idea of, but she did it because she was stubborn as a mule, and because she was also literally somebody who came across the United States from Michigan to Utah in a wagon. That's how long ago she lived to see the TV be invented, to fly to California to visit her grandchildren.

It always blew her mind like she thought, you know, being in a plane was weird and not great. But my point is about the biohacking crowd who, I almost said his name, but we'll just say the biohacking crowd who wants to live to be, you know, 200 or something ludicrous. It's just, it seems like it's going to, it's going to take a toll, I think, at some point. I just don't know what it is. The phrase ends badly. I'm sorry to say. It seems like, I don't know, we're supposed to live within 100 years-ish.

Diana MacKay: Well, look at that. I mean, shouldn't we be grateful? It wasn't so long ago we were supposed to live to 70 or 75. Yeah, yeah. And that's the point is if we're going to live to 100, let's live it well. And sure, there's always going to be a few people out there that want to have immortality and extend their lifetimes and, you know, go for it.

So long as you're not over-consuming on our limited resources on the planet and all that kind of thing, then so be it. But I think the vast majority of us are pretty content. We're pre-programmed to understand you come into the world, you live your life and you leave the world and there's no getting around that and therefore make the most of it. And unfortunately, not enough people are sort of, you know, doing the right things day to day so that they can make the most of it. And you just, my heart breaks for the children in particular that have fallen into poor, poor, poor health, not by their own fault, but by the diets their parents are feeding them the negligence of the communities around them that don't value playing outdoors or activities at school, sports activities, you know, gym time, you know, just kids are getting overweight. And that's just the first step towards a lifetime of additional problems as they get older.

You just can't, you cannot be obese and expect to have no health problems. So that's the biggest challenge. And you know what, I see it through my father's experience, he's written about it for decades. I see it in my own lifetime.

I see it around the world. And you know, I think the solution is so easy. And yet, for some reason, people find it hard to make those simple lifestyle changes. And some of them, you know, admittedly are very hard to make because, you know, the prices of nutritious food are so high.

Yeah. And it's not, you know, there's lots of other challenges. But on the other hand, the price of a nutritious meal isn't out of reach for most. And yet we still tend to spend money on the bag of chips from Costco, as you say, then, you know, pick up an apple. I love that.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, pick up an apple. That's a very mom thing to say. That's great. Pick up an apple, put down the chips. Well, and that's one of the things I can't remember. I made a note here about this.

I don't remember if this is from reading columns or the book. But there's a certain wonderfully practical angle of some of the ideas are make a phone call, take a walk with a friend. Yeah, I love this one. Cook with music on. That's a great one. I tend to listen to loud music, so that can scare some people. But I love cook with music. Cook with music.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, I do too. I mean, I'm not a good cook, but it helps if I put the music up loud, then all of a sudden I become a much better, much better.

TalkToMeGuy: And I would add to that, take a walk in nature. Absolutely. There's actually a doctor. She's a cardiologist who retired from being a cardiologist to get her PhD as a botanist. Diana Baersthert Kroger, who writes a whole section in her book about forest bathing. And in Japan, you may be aware of this because of your lifetime in Japan, that they have forests with pathways, of course, neat, tidy little pathways I get in Japan, pathways to walk in. And it's called forest bathing. And you go there to actually get the benefit of the esters, the oils that the trees are putting off. And she did research, and they've done research looking at the long-term beneficial effects of walking in the forest, cognitive enhancement, immune positive effects. Just walking in the forest. And it's not a special forest, it's just a forest.

Diana MacKay: Well, I have to say, Diana Baersthert Kroger is a neighbor of mine. Wow. There's something special about Merrickville, Ontario, Canada. I'll put it on the map for you. She has a place just down the road from me. I've also got a hundred acres here. In this part of Canada, it's not a big deal to have, you know, we've got a lot of land. And there's a woman in our community who is a certified forest bathing specialist or whatever you call that.

Wow. And I've gone out with her twice. And it's wonderful. You know, you can have a facilitated visit to the forest where you actually are encouraged to observe what you're seeing and to hear what you're hearing and to get down on your hands and knees and feel the earth and smell the different kinds of trees. And that's really the science behind forest bathing. It has a lot to do with the chemicals actually that the trees emit. And there's some interesting research that's been done on, I think, it's Diana Baersthert Kroger in part that's done it, on some of those chemicals that are affecting not just the people that walk by, but the whole ecosystem of the trees and the roots and the fungi and it goes on. It's really fascinating stuff. Yeah. So yeah, we're, I practice that myself and I love it.

TalkToMeGuy: And it's beautiful. I mean, that's the thing is I think that there is, unfortunately, I lost contact with a guy who I could actually ask this question of, I suspect that there is actually not only the esters or the oils coming out of the trees and the, there's also research of people who travel or spend, I would say, more time outdoor that have, they have more developed microbiome because they're getting more exposed to, you know, beneficial pathogens. And I think that there's actually benefit to the nervous system when you gaze at beauty.

And I consider for us to be beauty. I think there's, I think there's an actual calming effect to the nervous system. And that that will in fact affect, I think anytime you can smooth out the nervous system, you're going to have benefit on the immune system.

Diana MacKay: You know, I suspect that the exact same thing as when you have a drink in the evening and if you don't want to have a drink in the evening, then go and gaze at something beautiful, absolutely, or go smell the trees. You know, it sounds silly, but it's not silly. These are the things that make you relax, make you feel, you know, the fight or flight, you know, it gets all those horrible hormones and activities in your body that sort of suggests stress, stress, stress.

Well, this is the exact offset of that. You know, you could call it yoga, you could meditation. I love the idea that you just expressed of gazing is something that you find beautiful. Like, I'm going to go do that tonight. Thank you for the idea.

And I'm going to do it deliberately. And that's what I think really helps people is if they can read in a column or they hear a radio program like this, and they say, okay, that's like a funny idea or something makes sense. You know, I'm like, you got to go try it, you have to go do it. And that's the hard part is going and doing it. So whatever people need to, you know, action these things, figure out what it is, and then lock it in. You know, if it's writing it down on your list for the day and crossing it off your list, do that. Or if it's, you know, tying a string around your finger and do that. Or if it's telling somebody, some people are motivated by committing, you know, in a promise to somebody, then that's great too. What's fascinating, and you know, it hats off to the very few doctors that are now prescribing these kinds of things or even just talking about prescribing a walk in the woods.

If that's what you need, then ask your doctor to prescribe it for you. You know, that it's not good enough just to acknowledge that these are good ideas. We actually have to go and get many, many, many more people doing them all the time.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, I don't know if you can help me. I happen to live about half an hour from, I have redwoods in the neighborhood that I'm in, but I live about half an hour from a forest grove of redwoods that is a big, a renowned part, you know, place in Northern California. And I always resist going there just because it's kind of a am I so stupid? This is like a half an hour drive to get to, and it is just, I have never, and a number of people that have joined me in this adventure, have ever come back from that experience of being in the redwoods, not feeling different slash better. I know that's too many negatives, but you know what I mean.

Diana MacKay: I do. I do. And I think there's, well, you know, this is the kind of healing that probably needs to be accompanying the medical healing that is also so important. You know, there's, thank God, we have science that explains, you know, how certain medications can help us in one thing or another, and hats off to all that. And I'm so happy with that.

But at the same time, I don't think we're doing enough to pair that treatment that doctors provide and hospitals provide and the health system provides more broadly with, you know, the this kind of activity that we're talking about now, the sort of self initiated happiness, you know, inducing activity. It sounds a little bit light, doesn't it?

TalkToMeGuy: But no, no, no, no. I'm a Californian. It sounds great. I have no resistance to any of that. Yes, all of that. Perfect.

Diana MacKay: You know, if we all did all of that a lot more, we certainly wouldn't be doing a lot of the other things that are driving us all to, you know, you have a lot of problems have to do with people that are, are, are dedicating their time to nefarious activities that, you know, not not leading us anywhere good. Right.

TalkToMeGuy: And I know that this just floats up because this is in the same category. And I know that Doc was fond of a glass of rum in the evening. But I also know from, because I interviewed both of you, when he wrote his another book that I can't remember the title of now, the retirement book. Yes. But, you know, that he was a big fan of an evening glass of rum, but he was also doing it in typically a social setting. Yeah.

So you have a combination of, yes, you're having a warming, lovely rum, I would tend toward tequila just because that's my choice. But the same thing, where there's conversation, there's visiting, there's sharing, there's that thing back and forth called a conversation. Yeah.

Diana MacKay: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, and one of his articles years ago was about the Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto that had a pub in the hospital. And that was because, if I recall the story correctly, in the, you know, there were a lot of veterans that were returning from service. And yeah, they just like, they needed a place to talk to each other. And while they were having long recoveries in this particular hospital, somebody, somebody had the idea to open up a pub.

And my father loved that idea. He went to see it. He talked with the, the, what he called the barmaid. And she knew all the patients' names and she poured their drink of choice. You know, they were allowed one drink and that was all they needed. And he was so devastated when they shut down that pub years later.

And he always said that they should reopen it. And by the way, every other hospital should have one too. And by the way, every retirement home should have a pub as well. And that was one of the criteria he was looking for in the retirement home. He chose it 99 or 100 years of age.

I guess it was 99. And, you know, it was hard to find. And even when we did find one, you know, it wasn't quite what he was looking for. It's, it, he was looking for a place to have that social drink where, you know, you're not urged to have a meal at the same time. You know, it's not the restaurant.

It's, it's a, it's a social scene and, and for talking to each other and sharing stories. And yeah, he was really, really good at that. And we always had it in our household 535 o'clock every day. It was always a time for sitting back and having a drink for dinner.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, I grew up in that household. It was always cocktail. Well, my parents were cocktailers. They were classic 50s, 60s cocktailers. Yeah, some would consider them heavy drinkers. But to me it was just cocktailing.

But friends would drop by. My parents built a house and had a Dutch door. The front door was a Dutch door. And the reason they did that is people could, you know, drive by after work and knock on the door says, Hey, is the bar open yet? And they'd come and be yes, it was, it was built around the consumption of alcohol. But the truth was it was a way for them to gather and talk.

Yeah, that was it. You know, walk, growing up as a kid, I watched that. And I was a pretty quiet, so you wouldn't know it today. I was a pretty sort of reclusive quiet child for I'm making up for it now.

And I would watch that where they would all come various people that all family friends would just stop by some in the neighborhood, some driving back to back from their day of work or even driving over the hill from where they lived on the other side of the peninsula to come visit. But it was all about the social, much more about the social conversational, what's going on? How's that going? If you got that fixed yet, there was liquor involved, but it was just the conviviality of being in conversation and gathering.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, yeah. I think we've got a I'm a I'm a Gen Xer. So I'm really counting on the boomers that are now aging into, you know, their senior years, that they'll fix a lot of these things by sheer volume and and by the traits of their generation, they're very much focused on themselves.

Yeah. And so I do have some hope that we'll see more, you know, kinds of creativity in housing for seniors that will generate more spaces for social activity. Some of them are fantastic, you know, I've seen some that are just absolutely fantastic. But they're very, very, very few. And they're unfortunately not the government run ones, which are almost criminal. What's happening to people that can't afford to, you know, get private care. And yeah, and we should talk a little bit too about families because we in North America anyway, we don't have a tradition of living intergenerationally. Yeah.

And that's that's not so good. And there's so many reasons now why it's it's the time has come for us to consider it because of cost that, you know, that's a major driver, young people can't afford their own homes. And older folks are having trouble on limited incomes to maintain themselves in decent housing. And so why don't we really have a lot more housing that is constructed and designed for intergenerational families, where the youngsters can keep an eye out on the older folks, the older folks can keep an eye out on the younger folks, they can, you know, help each other when needed. It just seems so logical on every level of analysis. And I think the hold up is that we've got decades of now housing constructed with exactly the opposite intention of separating everybody.

And even you look at our nursing homes, as we call them, where retirement facilities, you know, it's all about privacy, if you can get it, you know, everyone is trying to get it. Whereas a little bit more social sort of scenes would be much better, I think.

TalkToMeGuy: There's a home rebuilding show. And it's based out of it's in Hawaii. And it's this young Hawaiian couple who grew up in that culture. And it's the first it's the only show that I watch about home international living, where they regularly use the term, we're building a house for intergenerational living. Because it's part of their culture, the Hawaiian culture, where the elders live with you. So when they're building a house, they're talking about, Oh, mom and dad's bedroom will be back there, or maybe they'll have an ad you on the property for them. Or maybe but I mean, it's always in the context of how they're remodeling a house. No other show that I watch and I see a bunch of them. Because I just enjoy watching it. And it gets me around the country or world.

Diana MacKay: Yeah, I didn't know that about the Hawaiians, but I'd love to hear that.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, that's the only show that I see in that realm of home remodeling or home building, where they always have it in the conversation, always in the conversation. It's never once it's not anything special, people coming to the homes. Since they've been doing they've done a lot of homes in Hawaii, on all the islands. They're they have a reputation of doing beautiful work. But also that that's part of it when when families come to look at the home.

Oftentimes, it'll be the primaries, but then come possibly waddling in will be the mom or the dad to come and look and see if you know how it would look work for them as well. But it's always designed with the idea of being intergenerational. There's always a space for that.

Diana MacKay: And I think that's just wonderful. Let's hope we get a little bit more of it. I'd like to put a plea out there to all of the boomers to please fix that for us.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, and yeah, get on that. Yeah, get on that. I'm not sure I'm one of the boomers. I think I'm too old for boomers. I want to talk for a moment about the Ortho-Molecular Medicine Society. And they did a wonderful gathering.

I think it was a Zoom, as I recall. I listened to it. Amar's to Doc. And when they spoke of him, they said of him that he had a legacy of quiet excellence and honored him as a true pioneer. And I just had a sense and particularly one of the people, Dr. Levy, who I've interviewed a number of times was one of the people at this gathering online. And there was such reverence for Doc. And I mean that in the best of ways. Do you have a sense of what that community saw in him that the broader medical establishment missed? That's a great question.

Diana MacKay: I can tell you that my father was so honored to be invited by them, whom he acknowledged as extraordinary scientists with such deep expertise in their fields, conducting, you know, wonderful research that was far beyond what my father was doing in research. You know, my dad was not a researcher at all, other than the research work for writing a column. And, you know, he was really surprised that he was invited to sit amongst them as a member of their editorial board. And he always spoke so highly of them.

And in return to have their respect for him was something he really admired and was happy to, you know, he was very proud of that. And I think the reason that they found my father, you know, sort of valuable was that he communicated to people, which I think scientists who are busy in their labs are not, they don't have time for it. And they're trained to write publications for the research community.

And they're rewarded for that. And so there's very few in that kind of a group, whether it's the Ortho-Molecular Medicine Society or the, you know, you name it, any other research group, or group of specialists in research, you know, there's few that are sort of translators. And my father was a translator.

And I think they really valued every time he would explain some of the research work they were doing or the findings that they were so interested in having more broadly disseminated, you know, he could do that. And particularly around vitamin C and lysine, but other natural remedies as well. You know, even the word Ortho-Molecular, you know, that's sort of people have a foggy idea what that means. And my dad was able to explain, you know, this is about using nutrients in higher volumes than you normally do through your diet alone.

And these are scientists that are studying that. And yeah, they were, they were, they were very generous to my dad. And in turn, Richard, they've been extraordinarily kind in offering me to be a member of their editorial board too, which is something that would have stunned my father. And similarly, stuns me.

But you know, I can tell you the same thing. It's the translation of the research work, which needs to be done more. And so that's, that's what you do. It's what I do. And we need more people to get involved.

TalkToMeGuy: I used to go to a group, we're going to go a couple of minutes long, everybody. I used to go to a group called Smart Life Forum. And that's where I met a lot of these practitioners in the West Coast. And that's where I met Richard Kuhn and a number of other, I haven't ever met Dr. Levy. But it was a, it was a group of these were the people who wrote the books for care or medical or possibly alternative health thoughts for universities like Stanford and Yale and Harvard and all the places. This was the group of people mostly who were retired, who had written the books. And so they had all that foundational knowledge. And they were, then they wanted to get together and have somebody like Bruce Lipton and come in and talk about his theories of affecting the health system by affecting the receptor sites and the hormone receptor sites. Or, you know, just hundreds of people that I've heard lecture there. So I was around a lot of orthomolecular talk. So that's why I say it so casually like, oh, orthomolecular, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah.

But it's, it does need somebody such as yourself who's a translator to be able to take it into the world of now read this nice soft article, perhaps with a glass of rum, it'll help soothe everything. So that's very exciting. I think that's very cool for you. But that does lead me because I didn't, I don't want to end the show before we do talk about vitamin C. And your dad being the, you know, huge advocate, and I was so happy to see that you came up because you'd had one vitamin C powder product.

And then that, I guess, was acquired. And now you still have the gifts owned vitamin C. So could you talk about that formula and his, well, A, why he became such an advocate for high dose vitamin C from his own life experience?

Diana MacKay: Well, he had just interviewed Linus Pauling, I think around the time. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure the timeline of here, but he had interviewed Linus Pauling, who as most people know, perhaps, was sort of, can you, can we call him the founder of orthomolecular medicine? And maybe, maybe I could.

TalkToMeGuy: Two time Nobel Prize winning chemist who was looking at, you know, the problem of why are people having heart attacks in, you know, there's like this epidemic of heart attacks that were coming on in the 50s and 60s and so on. Hadn't been part of the medical scene before then. In fact, my father has a story in his memoir about when he was at the Harvard Medical School in the late 40s. The professors told their class that back in the old days, whenever there was a heart attack case coming into the hospital, they put out a call on the system saying, come, come immediately, we've got a heart attack patient here, because it was so rare.

But fast forward to today, it's definitely not rare. And Linus Pauling was trying to figure out if there's something about, you know, humans versus animals that were having such trouble with heart attacks and animals weren't. And animals manufacture their own vitamin C, whereas humans and strangely enough, the guinea pig, but don't, you know, we have to eat it in our diet to get it. And Linus Pauling was studying very, very high doses of vitamin C to see what the impact was on cardiovascular health and other things as well. But it was my father's interest in his work on cardiovascular health that led him to refuse to take the statins that his cardiologists suggested he take upon recovery from his heart attack. And he opted instead, based on Pauling's research to take very high doses of vitamin C in combination with lysine to keep those arteries rubbery, you know, and you look at the molecular, the molecular kind of effect of vitamin C and lysine on the strength of the cell walls and their joints together.

It's profoundly convincing, at least it was to my father, and it certainly is to me, that this is a good way to keep your cardiovascular system healthy. And now, what do we mean by high doses? And my father's case, he was taking for about 27 years, 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C and lysine, 10,000 vitamin C, half that of lysine. And I'm doing about 4,000 a day, because I'm not a heart attack victim like my father was. So that's my dosage. But yeah, he's written extensively about this on our website, which is dotgif.com, www.docgif .com. And there's lots to think about there for sure, Richard.

TalkToMeGuy: There sure is. And can I get the dotgif vitamin C from Amazon or from American distributors? Are you distributing as well? Are you the exclusive distributor so far?

Diana MacKay: Well, first, I want to really encourage you to read my column this week. I think it's coming out in the next couple of days about, you know, it's fascinating. I want to be really upfront with everybody right away that, yes, we're writing a column and we're writing about good health. And occasionally, we're going to mention this particular product that my father formulated, and I don't see a conflict of interest about that whatsoever. I'm in the business of improving people's health. And yes, there's a product that my father now, you know, he endorsed a product previously that was a combination of vitamin C and lysine. And that endorsement disappeared after the company that owned the product and was co-developed with my father was purchased by a big corporation. And so my father created his own, his own formula, you know, so that he could leave this earth knowing that his work on vitamin C and lysine would not be for naught.

And he still would have his message out there. It's called GIFS own cardio vibe. And it's available in natural health food stores and also online from GIFS own.ca. Okay, great.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you. It's a great product. I take it every day.

Diana MacKay: Well, I think my father would tell you what it's what kept him alive till 101. And we had so many people writing to us and my family about the impact my father's work had on their lives, including recommendations for high dose vitamin C and lysine. So yeah, there's a it's it's it is it is a good formula. It's a great formula and it tastes good. Yes. Yes, it tastes good.

TalkToMeGuy: It does it all in water and you drink, you know, and and what can be bad about drinking something and water, more water people sit down, please back away from the soda drink water. Okay. That was very fun, Diana. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. And we could go on. I know, but I'll stop now.

Diana MacKay: It's always a pleasure to talk with you and thank you as well.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of the week and we'll see you next week. Bye bye.