Jul 24, 2017
Dear Hossein,
I am glad to hear that you are recovering from the flu. Rita had a recent health scare but is also doing fine now. At our age, we must take very good care of ourselves in order to sustain our life’s work and to continue to enjoy the fruits of recovery.
Reconnecting recovery—particularly long-term recovery--to acute medical treatment has been a central theme within each of our efforts these past decades, and I think we have each made progress in our respective countries in this regard. Congress 60 members are now carrying this message into the clinics and larger culture in Iran, and similar efforts are underway in the U.S., but we still have far to go in this regard. It is good that we are both mentoring younger people who will carry this work into the future after we are no longer here to help lead this effort. I am particularly delighted that Ehsan is now working in one of the clinics following completion of his education.
Stating the Physician Legion was an excellent idea that will bear many benefits in the years to come. In recent years, addiction medicine specialists in the U.S. have organized themselves into a professional association and hold regular educational meetings to exchange ideas and methods. I had the opportunity to address them a few times at these meetings and to publish articles in their journal. We have come a long way from the days physicians did not want to be associated with the treatment of addiction.
I am very impressed with the results you report on the use of social media to reach people at earlier stages of addiction. I was at first hesitant to get involved in such media but have found my website and weekly recovery blog a very effective way to reach people—far more effective than I thought possible.
Thank you for the video and photos of the Congress 60 Wrestling Team’s travels to Armenia. I greatly enjoyed both the video and the photos.
Work on writing my professional memoir—a lessons learned over the past five decades—is nearing completion. The writing is done and Rita is now helping me with formatting the book so that it can be available as a paperback and an e-book. I have not done an e-book before so I am learning a lot about the process and hope this will be a way to reach younger readers who prefer this reading format. I will send you a copy as soon as it is complete.
My work these days is focused on finishing up some of the historical research that is of interest to me, consulting on several recovery research projects, and drafting recovery blogs for posting on my website. The tech work on transferred my website to Wordpress platform is proceeding and as soon as the Papers or Recovery Around the World sections are completed, I will be able to post my latest blog on Congress 60 with a link to the article we published in the journal Counselor. I regret that getting the blog posted has taken so long.
I wish you, your family, and all members of Congress 60 a wonderful summer.
Friends and Brothers Forever,
Bill