Here’s what’s going on…
Happy dog on-board
June 3
Boston
Intense discussion ongoing since we arrived. Drs Bonoiu and Baig are amazing hosts, as always, and ideas don’t stop coming when we meet. We talk about everything under the sun (well, moon!) but, when it gets to pharmacotherapy, the need for optimized treatment algorithms surfaces as not yet there. They are the piece of the puzzle that most don’t see missing. Is like a missing a piece of the clear blue sky on your puzzle. You keep searching for a clear blue sky looking shape and, in fact, what belongs there is a bright red butterfly printed piece. You saw that “mismatched” piece forever and, yet, you never thought it belonged there. One can only recognize it as being the missing piece in two ways: 1) waiting until the last piece missing to search for the missing shape, or 2) realize ahead of time that a butterfly belongs in the sky or on the flowers.
That’s how I feel about optimized treatment algorithms. We realized that they belong in the healthcare process since 5-6 years ago. However, few get the picture of the puzzle and even fewer get a turn at placing a piece in the puzzle…
Morning joy
June 4
All perfect, but the rain was totally unnecessary. We had a great time and entertained great ideas. What’s the rain-thing you ask? Well…, we have a dog. I mean a WET dog now!! You know what’s worse than a wet dog? A long haired wet dog in a car ready to drive 200+ miles!!
Wet dog, stinky dog
Ha! You won’t believe it! Fifty miles into our trip, we found ourselves on the same road with Louis CK 😀 It took a few secs to process, so we didn’t get the chance to wave leaving our noses’ grease on the car windows 😀 Anyway, what a small world!
Bye, Massachusetts! Connecticut, here we come 🙂
First thing we love about this place is the gas prices: 50c below Boston and our tank in nearly empty. Perfect! As we drive South, this can only get better 🙂
Very productive trip! We have now an agreement on what the optimal B vitamin supplementation requirements are in patients with diabetes mellitus, especially when it comes to methylated vs unmethylated content. That’s what I mean spending a fruitful time on a trip 😀
In meantime:
Hello NYC!
What a beautiful Manhattan view!
4:30pm
Welcome to New Jersey
Not unexpected, we barely skipped the NYC end of hours traffic (by 15min or so). Now already making plans for the rest of the day here: seminar advertising locally and online, meeting tomorrow, B supplement formula, ARDF grant review, IRB protocol design and… reinforcement for Alex’s Regents exam review. To be honest, I don’t believe that to be it for the day. There will likely be more to do for the remainder 7h of today but, for now, we celebrate passing the 650mile milestone of the MSA2018. Stay tuned!
5:00pm
Checked-in our new hotel room. The number of beds was wrong. Naturally, we requested another room. The second smelled like 10 smokers lived there for the last decade. Luckily, we got a third room. This one was their postapocalyptic version (I’ll save you too many photo details – one below).
Still, we looked on the bright side: we had wifi and started working. Things got a bit more interesting toward midnight when an uninvited guest crawled on my bed. Granted, I failed terribly the taxonomic classification of the first bug we found. The second, however, was a bed bug beyond the shadow of a doubt! We all went bananas!! Pulled out the macro lense and proceeded to indecent photo exposures of the poor bug.
The manager on the shift shrug shoulders and gave us the… 4th room. We thought this last one must have been their inspector-ready room. No fun though: the biological containment of the clothing worn in the previous room took us a good one and a half hour. Keeping our cool is still in progress. Everyone is determined to call the local health department but we first want to focus on not carrying any “passengers” with us!
2:00am
I am beyond sleepy getting ready for our bussiness meeting tomorrow. Missed on finishing at least half of what I needed to. Jeeeeez, New Jersey…! Why do you live down to expectations??
June 5
Beyond exciting plans for the future! Precision Prevention arose as a more desirable alternative to Precision Medicine. If not too long ago patient involvement was thought to be the key of outcomes’ improvement, today we are ready for an approach that would rather allow the patient focus on the important aspects that matter to them personally while leaving no room for failure in their treatment design. A design planned with such extent of precision that basically can’t fail. Would you call this fiction? I call this the dream of Precision Prevention.
10:00pm
We made it in Virginia 🙂 The Jefferson Forest is both endless and amazing. One only develops an appreciation of the “map scale” of this forest if walking the walk (or driving it, rather!). There are, literally, hundreds of miles of forest rolling over mountains and countless foothills. I’m in awe, totally…