May 31, 2018
Dear Hossein,
Thanks you for the saffron and your information on it. Rita will enjoy using this in her cooking.
During this period of fasting and reflection, I wanted to provide you with a progress report and what I hope you will find to be very good news. First, my meeting with Dr. Hamed Ekhtiari went very well and we developed a few preliminary ideas about how we might work together to support research activities with and within Congress 60. We both felt to that end it would be helpful to involve another U.S. researcher in our preliminary discussions who had visited Iran and who would share our interests. To that end, we contacted Dr. Richard Rawson who for decades conducted his research and international consulting and teaching activities from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has visited Iran and Congress 60 in the past and willingly agree to meet with Dr. Ekhtiari and myself. We have a teleconference scheduled June 13 to discuss how we might transcend some of the barriers we have encountered in our efforts to promote international collaborations on Congress 60 research. I will send you a summary of the main discussion points from meeting.
On a related issue, I have reopened communications with our UK colleagues from the University of Sheffield in England. As you recall, the major obstacle we encountered involved the issue of travel insurance for the researchers to visit Congress 60 for research planning meetings. In my recent discussions with Dr. Best and Dr. Edwards, I suggested the option of working with a researcher from Iran to do the onsite work and that overall planning for any research could be done by teleconference. They were very open to exploring this. They are currently involved in doing Life in Recovery surveys with several European countries and they suggested the possibility of replicating that survey in Iran in collaboration with Congress 60 and one or more Iranian research scientists.
I'm sure there are many other possibilities, but I think they hinge on creating an international team of research collaborators and using teleconferencing where travel is not possible or affordable. I agree that the ultimate goal is to scientifically evaluate the OT/DST method and all the recovery supports within which it is nested within Congress 60, but any published research involving Congress 60 will help us reach that ultimate goal. My plan is to talk with the UK researchers again after the meeting with Dr. Rawson. Again, I will let you know the outcome of these discussions. The main thing is that things look more hopeful to me than they did a few weeks ago.
I have been reading the research reports of Dr. Ekhtiari and I am very impressed with the work he has done to date. I think evaluation of the DST method using brain scans over time would make a marvelous research project. I am also very impressed with the capabilities of the Iranian National Brain Mapping Lab that would make a wonderful partner in this potential research.
I find myself impatient in the face of all these possibilities and the slowness with which they develop, but I must remind myself of how far we have already come and that patience and endurance were key to these achievements.
Friends and Brothers Forever,
Bill