Top 10 Posts of 2019: Number 5!

Counting down the Top 10 posts of the year...here's #5, a Q&A with Zara Raheem first posted on July 26.

Zara Raheem, photo by Nang Ngoc Pham

Zara Raheem is the author of the new novel The Marriage Clock. She teaches English and creative writing, and she lives in Southern California. 

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Marriage Clock, and for your character Leila? 

A: The idea came to me when I was going through the arranged process myself. Whenever I would share with friends details about the crazy, awkward, frustrating dates I was being set up on by my parents, they always seemed really entertained and fascinated by the whole process and encouraged me to start writing my experiences down. Gradually, those writings turned into the premise behind The Marriage Clock.

With Leila, I wanted a main character who not only felt familiar to me, but who also resembled the type of women I saw around me. Leila is outspoken, independent, unapologetic in her Americanness while also possessing a sense of pride in her South Asian roots.

I think oftentimes when you have a South Asian-American protagonist, they tend to fall on extreme ends of the spectrum—they are either too South Asian or too American. Leila, however, embraces her dual identities and doesn’t feel a need to reject or abandon her culture and traditions in order to “prove” her Americanness. She’s comfortable occupying the space in between, and I felt it was important to tell the story from her perspective since she, in many ways, redefines what it means to be a modern Muslim, South Asian woman living in the West. 

Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing, or did you make many changes along the way? 

A: Initially, I had no idea how I wanted the book to end. I’ve never been a very detailed outliner, so even though I had the premise and a few ideas for certain scenes in mind, the rest I left pretty open-ended. As I began writing and developing the characters and the story, Leila’s journey eventually took on a life of its own, and by the time I reached the final chapter, everything leading up to it kind of came together, and I felt strongly about where her story should end.

 Q: You dedicate the novel "to every woman who's ever been told she wasn't enough." What inspired that dedication, and what do you hope readers take away from the book? 

A: I think whether it’s at work, in our relationships, in our consumption of social media, women are constantly being told that we are not “good” enough, and these messages of inadequacy often have a lasting impact on our self-esteem, our perceptions of self-worth, and the choices that we make.

My hope is that Leila’s journey will resonate with readers, and perhaps challenge women to seek beyond the societal and cultural expectations of marriage and family in order to discover their own definitions of happiness. 

Q: What are some of your favorite books? 

A: I have a pretty eclectic taste in books—from Victorian literature to suspense thrillers to mystical poetry. With fiction, I would say that I’m mostly drawn to immigrant/cross-cultural stories. Some of my favorite books are The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, There, There by Tommy Orange, and pretty much anything written by Khaled Hosseini. 

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: I am currently working on a short story collection that centers around Muslim-American characters, the South Asian diaspora, and first-and-second generation immigrants. 

Q: Anything else we should know? 

A: One of my favorite parts of this whole publishing journey has been connecting with fellow readers and writers through social media. So for anyone interested to know more about The Marriage Clock and any upcoming works, you can find me at www.zararaheem.com and on Instagram at @za_ra_heem. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Top 10 Posts of 2019: Number 6!

On with the countdown of the Top 10 posts of 2019...here's number 6, a Q&A with Uwe Westphal first posted on June 22.

Uwe Westphal is the author of Fashion Metropolis Berlin 1836-1939: The Story of the Rise and Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry, now available in an English translation. His other books include Ehrenfried & Cohn and The Bauhaus. He has worked as a journalist and producer, and he lives in Berlin and London.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book on the history of Jewish fashion in Berlin, and how big a role did the Jewish community play in Berlin's fashion industry before World War II?

A: After leaving university, I dreamt of becoming a foreign correspondent, but unfortunately no one would offer me a job as one! So I started my journalistic life as a fashion reporter in Berlin, traveling to fashion shows in Paris, Milan and London. And that’s how I started meeting Jews who had once worked in the Berlin fashion industry. 

They told me about how the fashion business in Berlin had first started - in 1836. The founding businessmen had been Valentin Manheimer and Herrmann Gerson – they had introduced the novel idea of standardised clothing sizes. The anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe had been behind both men’s decision to immigrate to Berlin at a time when the city was emerging as a thriving metropolis, right in the center of Europe.

Their revolutionary concept of producing ready-to-wear clothing in a range of standard sizes led to the general public being able to afford fashionable clothing for the first time. Within 30 years, Manheimer and Gerson had established large, much loved fashion stores throughout Berlin.

By 1873, about 90 percent of all fashion businesses in Berlin were owned by Jewish businessmen, whose superior know-how of tailoring, together with their international connections, enabled them to dominate the industry. “Berlin Chic” was exported across the globe. 

Even the First World War did not slow down the rise of Jewish influence - fashion firms and their designers played a crucial role in Germany’s clothing industry. What became known as “democratic fashion for women,” i.e. clothing without the need for corsets, thereby paying tribute to working women’s emancipation, was attributable to Jewish stylistic innovations.

The Weimar republic, with its new artistic influences and trends from music, theatre, film, and Bauhaus style and architecture represented the pinnacle of what fashion can achieve. After 1933 and the Nazi rise to power, it became clear that National Socialist ideology was the exact opposite of what had once been Berlin fashion style. 

Even after the world economic crisis of the late 1920s, in 1933 Berlin still had 2,700 Jewish top fashion firms with 100,000 employees. Just six years later there were a mere 90 Jewish fashion companies left in existence because, by then, almost all had been either forcibly closed or Aryanized, their properties confiscated and their former owners forced to flee the country.  

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: The most difficult part of my research was finding documented evidence of confiscation and theft of Jewish properties and firms. After German reunification in 1990 and open borders with Eastern Europe, things changed. More archives became available for research.

Old tax documents revealed what I had suspected all along - Jewish fashion firms had been “Aryanized” by loyal Nazi businessmen who had taken advantage of, and profited immensely from, the political situation. Result: a Berlin fashion industry without Jews. 

Contacting other researchers, I found breathtaking documents revealing what had happened during the years 1941–1945. Nazi officials, together with German fashion designers and industrialists like Hugo Boss, had established large slave labor camps for the production of clothing near concentration camps.

Horrifyingly, I found that the Nazis made use of some 18 such facilities to produce millions of items of clothing for both the general population and the army. Additionally, stolen fabrics from Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest were used to dress the Nazi elite; the clothes themselves made in such camps. The most shocking revelation: German fashion designers supplied drawings for garments they wanted made at what was called Fashion Salon Auschwitz.  

Q: The book includes various photos and other documents. How did you find them, and how did you choose the ones to include?

A: I have 150 photographs and documents in the book. These cover a time span ranging from the beginnings of industrialised fashion in 1840 to the end of the Third Reich in 1945. Most of them I received from former Jewish fashion designers and business owners, as well as their descendants, who emigrated to the UK and USA. 

Dina Gold, a descendant of the founder of Berlin’s oldest international fur fashion company, H. Wolff, wrote a chapter in the book and supplied me with photos and documents.

A series of 12 photographs of the Berlin clothing manufacturer Leopold Seligmann show, for the first time, images of the company’s personnel, offices, fashions, and workshops. These pictures are unique.

The elegance of “Berlin Chic” is documented in some spectacular original color drawings given to me by the person who drew them. Other photos and documents I found in Yad Vashem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wiener Library based in London, archives in Berlin and Poland. Sometimes at second-hand shops in Berlin. 

To make a choice was difficult. Ultimately, I picked the most unusual and representative illustrations. 

Fashion is essentially visual. In my experience, from speaking at book presentations, younger generations in particular are fascinated by the images that offer conclusive proof of how fashion, after 1933, became an integral part of Holocaust history. This is something almost all historians have overlooked.

Q: Can you say more about the impact World War II had on Berlin's fashion industry, and what is the situation today?

In the 1950s and subsequent two decades, West Berlin experienced an extraordinary revival, once again becoming Germany’s fashion capital. But the exceptional creativity of the 1920s and early 1930s had gone. There were no Jewish fashion designers or company owners left; they had either fled for their lives or been murdered. Those people who, during the Nazi era, had profited from the confiscation of Jewish firms and properties, carried on as if nothing unusual had happened,

Today Berlin’s fashion industry still suffers from a serious deficit of German-born talent. And to its immense shame, it continues to exist largely in a state of total denial about its predecessors’ participation in the destruction of the Jewish fashion industry. I hope my book puts the record straight.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Three years ago, I wrote a novel, Ehrenfried & Cohn, about a fictional Berlin fashion firm in 1935 Berlin and what happened to it during the Nazi years. I’m about to start the second volume.  

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: People whose parents, grandparents, or friends once worked in the Berlin Jewish fashion industry still contact me from around the world to tell me they have letters, diaries, documents, photos, and even sketches that they want to show me. Occasionally they even have items of pre-war manufactured clothing. I am always thrilled to be approached and I welcome anyone who wants to share with me such material. 

I plan on coming to the USA to talk about my book and historical research, so I look forward to meeting some of your readers.  

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Uwe Westphal.

Top Ten Posts of 2019: Number 7!

Continuing the countdown of the top 10 posts of the year: Here's #7, a Q&A with Vanessa McGrady first posted on February 10.

Vanessa McGrady, photo by Stephanie Simpson

Vanessa McGrady is the author of the new book Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and Forbes.com. She works in corporate communications, and she lives in Glendale, California.

Q: Why did you decide to write about your experience with an open adoption and at what point did you decide it would become a book? 

A: Well, to begin with, personal essays are my favorite things to write, and when major stuff happens to me, I try to make sense of it through story.

I wrote about Bridgett and Bill, my daughter’s birth parents, living with us for The New York Times’ parenting blog as it was happening. And after that, it kept feeling like it was a bigger story, and I thought it would be maybe a short e-book, so I just kept writing.

I had so much help shaping it and forming it into a longer, book-length piece with the help of my agent, Cheryl Pientka. And there were times when I wondered if there was enough there for a full volume, but I guess that depends on where you stop and start the story.

My editor, Carmen Johnson, also helped on the other end of it all to bring it up to where it needed to be. One of my favorite parts of the book happened when Carmen asked me to write more about my own parents, and it felt very appropriate to do that on my 50th birthday. It’s in the beginning of the book.

I’m so grateful to Cheryl and Carmen for their wisdom and insight during the whole process. 

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you? 

A: I had so many other title ideas that just didn’t cut it. Everything seemed too wrong or too “movie of the week” for what this book is. But the concept for the real title came to me in Texas, on the way to interview Bill and Bridgett.

From the book: "The drive the next day took me along scrubby fields toward the swelling Medina River carved into a granite shore. It had been so long since I’d been near water like this. I marveled at the riparian system: All these slate-grey rocks need the river for their form and placement. A river needs rocks to give it a path, to slow it down and speed it up. Rocks and rivers are intrinsic opposites, yet they are critical components of each other, together and separately.”

This seemed like the perfect metaphor for our situation. And then I worked with another friend to boil that down into the title I fell in love with, Rock Needs River. 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book? 

A: I hope they understand that adoption is very nuanced and it’s different for every family. I hope they understand that not every path to parenthood is a straight line. I hope they understand that it’s OK to say, “I was wrong, I messed up,” and then try to move forward from there. 

Because I feel like so many times we make these monumental fuck-ups until we finally get something right. That’s what this book is about. 

Q: What do your family members think of the book, and what is your relationship like at this point with your daughter's birth parents? 

A: My mother and my cousin Elizabeth are my only family members who have read the book so far, as far as I know, and they loved it (but my mother did have a question about one part where I talk about the intensity of visiting her, which is really my own limitation and lack of tools, not anything about her).

Peter, my ex-husband and Grace’s father, died in early January, very sadly and unexpectedly. His family has read the book and they are, for many reasons, uncomfortable with it.

A couple weeks before he died, I told Peter I would let him read an advance copy but might not like the book because it goes into our marriage and the issues that destroyed it. But he did say, “I just want people to know that Grace has a dad who is involved.” And I think I did that.

Bridgett and Bill have chosen not to be in contact with us at this time.  

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: Right now, just getting through the day, actually! I have my daily bread-and-butter writing work for brands and some journalism. I’m a 100 percent single mom now, so I need to balance that in and figure out how to do more for Grace as her sole parent. I do have a related project coming soon that I’ll share more about when it’s done. 

Q: Anything else we should know? 

A: I hope anyone who reads this book will do so with compassion and understanding that no person, or family, is perfect. I hope they’ll take a moment before deciding to judge someone on what they see at first glance, or whatever their preconceived ideas are, especially about marginalized people, like the homeless.

And that if you like a book, reach out and tell the author—the strangers who have done that for me in the past month have lit up my day every time and it means so much to me. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Top Ten Posts of 2019: Number 8!

Continuing our countdown of the top ten posts of 2019, here's #8, an interview with Susan Katz Miller first posted on April 27.

Susan Katz Miller is the author of the new book The Interfaith Family Journal. She also has written the book Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is based in the Washington, D.C. area.

Q: Why did you decide to write The Interfaith Family Journal?

A: There are several books out there on Jewish and Christian interfaith families, but this is the first book for all interfaith families. And it's the first published interactive resource for interfaith families--a workbook filled with writing prompts, invitations to converse, and creative activities.

The book takes you through a five-week process of going deep, with your family members, into how your formative religious, spiritual and secular experiences contribute to your dreams for the present and the future. I wanted to help interfaith families to envision how to be successful, whether they choose one religion, two religions, all religions, or no religions.

Q: How do you define an interfaith family? 

A: You could say that all families are interfaith families, because no two people share identical experiences, beliefs, or practices, even if they have the same religious (or secular) label. So I think this book is going to be helpful for any family, including atheist families engaging with religion in the extended family.

And it's not just for young couples--the book takes you through a process that will be helpful for single parents, parents of teens, child-free couples, guardians, and empty-nesters--anyone who wants to have a deeper understanding of the role of religion and culture in their family.

Q: How did you come up with the specific exercises you include in the book?

A: Since my first book, Being Both, came out five years ago, I have been traveling the country speaking about and with interfaith families. I coach couples who come to me for ideas and support, and have presented at workshops for interfaith couples for many years. I also drew on my own experiences growing up in an interfaith family, and raising two interfaith children who are now young adults.

All of this went into creating the five-week process in the book. Each week, you answer a series of writing prompts, then swap journals with your partner or family members and read what they wrote, then go through a guided conversation based on what you each wrote, and then engage in a creative activity together, including fun roles for children. 

Q: How have families reacted to the book so far, and what do you hope people take away from it? 

A: The book is brand new! But I have already heard from atheist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh readers that the book is unique in the way it encourages you to think deeply about where you have come from and where you are going.

Even couples who thought they had their interfaith family all figured out have found the creative activities, in particular, stimulating--including recording the religious histories of your parents and grandparents, creating a family recipe book, and planning your own funeral.

And I have heard from both clergy and therapists that this book is going to be an important tool for them in supporting interfaith families, especially young couples, and couples who may be struggling. People are saying it's a great gift for their clergy member or therapist, and a great engagement or wedding gift. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I admit I am obsessed with supporting interfaith families, as part of the urgent need to improve interfaith understanding and bridge-building in society at large. Ultimately, I believe this work creates more peace and reduces religious intolerance in the world. So I have a whole series of projects mapped out, some of them books, some of them new ways of empowering interfaith families as interfaith peacemakers.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I am an interfaith kid. My Jewish father married my Protestant mother in 1960. And after more than a half-century of extraordinary marriage, they both died while I was working on this book. All of my work, in a way, is a tribute to their epic relationship.

But as I spent the last few years caring for them, while simultaneously writing this book, I think this book distills much of what I learned growing up in a joyous interfaith family. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Susan Katz Miller.

Q&A with Doug Emlen

Doug Emlen is the author of Beetle Battles: One Scientist's Journey of Adventure and Discovery, a new book for kids. His other books include Animal Weapons. He is a biology professor at the University of Montana.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book for young readers?

A: I really believe that science is an adventure. I and most of the scientists I know travel the globe in pursuit of answers, attempting to solve our respective mysteries. This could mean climbing ropes into the canopies of tropical trees, following birds high on jagged slopes of the Himalayan mountains, or diving beneath Antarctic ice. 

In my case it meant living in a rainforest for several years studying beetles, and then following those beetles to Australia and Africa and Montana. It meant getting stranded in the dark in a strange country, surrounded by lions in a tent in the Serengeti, and landing backwards on an aircraft carrier. So in this very literal sense, doing science actually is an adventure. 

But science is also an intellectual adventure as we get swept into the thrill of solving a problem, piecing together clues in just the right way, answering questions no one has ever answered before. The rush from an epiphany can be electrifying, and for many of us this thrill -- the charge into the abyss of the unknown -- is even more exciting than the physical adventure of fieldwork.

I love everything about science, and I wanted to find a way to share this with middle-school aged kids. I had lots of help from a talented editor (Emily Feinberg) and an experienced (and incredible) children's book author (Dorothy Hinshaw Patent), as well as colleagues and friends, and, of course, my own children. 

I learned as I wrote that "people want to read about people", and that narrative stories are far more engaging than stand-alone non-fiction.

So I pulled out journals and letters I'd written to my girlfriend (now wife) more than 20 years before, and took a dive back into my past. I immersed myself in the fear and frustration, joy and determination that I'd felt while traipsing across South America in vain in an attempt to study a giant rhinoceros beetle, and all the ups and downs of my eventual work on tiny dung beetles in Panama. 

I realized I had all the adventure I needed to tell this story sitting right in front of me. So I set out to tell the tale.

This book is a journey in every sense of the word, and I hope it will feel as refreshing and enjoyable to readers as it felt for me. 

I try to pull kids into the world of a field biologist - the sounds and smells of a tropical forest at dawn, the agonizing tickle of hundreds of tiny ticks racing across your body, the overwhelming sensation of thousands of beetles falling from the sky into your hair and down the back of your neck and all over your lap.

Along the way there is of course biology -- woven throughout the fabric of this tale -- and there is a process. A logical method to the madness, a way of pursuing knowledge based on careful experimentation and comparison of predictions with results. 

Science is a self-correcting process, and at multiple points in my journey this meant I had to accept the fact that everything I thought I'd known was wrong. But that's also part of the journey, and it may be the most important lesson of all: often we are wrong, and that's okay.  

So why did I write this book? Because deep down I know there are kids out there who will love this type of a story, and I want to show them what it feels like to be a scientist. Who knows? Maybe some of them will decide to be a scientist too...

Q: In our previous interview, you discussed the similarities between animal and human weapons, and you write in this book, "And how incredible that insights from these same little beetles might help us understand our own weapons, the political realities we grapple with in our everyday lives--even threats to our national security!" What are some of the insights you've gained from researching these beetles?

A: The most timely insight comes from the sneaks and cheats. 

In my beetles this meant tiny males who could not afford to pay the price of having long horns. Instead of trying in vain to play by the rules, these little males cheat: they look and act like females, and they dig side tunnels that bypass the guarding male. By sneaking around the large, horned males, and finding the females on the sly, these males break the rules of engagement. 

As I discuss in Beetle Battles, I learned on this intellectual adventure that sneaky cheaters like these little beetles can collapse an arms race, since they erode the benefits of big weapons. 

Military technologies have the same vulnerability. The most elaborate, state-of-the-art weapons are incredibly expensive, often so costly that only the wealthiest nations can afford them. What do you do if you cannot afford these weapons? You cheat! 

Right now our most expensive weapons, things like aircraft carriers and F-35 fighters, are all at risk for the same reason: they depend critically on computers and software to function. And this makes them vulnerable to a sneaky, cheating tactic: Cyberhacking. 

Cyberhackers are exactly like sneaky dung beetles: by worming into the software control systems they can undermine the effectiveness of these technologies, without paying the price of producing those weapons themselves. 

There are actually lots of parallels between dung beetles (and other animals with big weapons) and our most expensive weapons, but the threat of cyberhacking is the most urgent, and the one I have been traveling to give talks about. 

Another scary parallel is the importance of "duels" -- one-on-one contests are a prerequisite for triggering an arms race. Politically, the world coalesced around a showdown between the United States and the USSR during the Cold War, and that one-on-one confrontation fueled the arms race. 

Today, our defense policy is starting to talk about a "Great Power Competition" between the U.S. and China. Well, if we take our lessons from dung beetles, then this a very scary and dangerous situation indeed, since it is exactly the type of showdown that is likely to spark a new arms race.

This might seem like a dark set of examples, especially for a "children's" book. But I find teenagers today are very dialed in with the events of the world around them, and I think they will appreciate the parallels. 

Academically, the fact that animal and military weapons are so similar is really cool. The relevance of the comparisons to contemporary events should only help make this all the more exciting. 

Q: The book includes a variety of photographs. How did you choose those?

A: Many of these are my own, taken at the time of the story, so I picked them to help bring the people and places (and animals!) to life. Everything about this book is intended to create the sensation of actually being there, and I think pictures make a really big difference. 

I also tracked down artists and photographers to beg permission to include some of their images, to bring the ships and planes and crazy animal extremes to full splendor. These really are extreme weapons, and words can only take you so far. Sometimes you really have to see these things to believe them.

Q: What do you hope young readers will take away from the book? 

A: We live in an increasingly polarized society, where science often gets caught in the crossfire. This has led to lots of misunderstanding, and, unfortunately, for a great many families, it has led to mistrust. This breaks my heart and terrifies me at the same time. 

I'm not sure how to fix this problem. But my gut tells me we go back to the basics. Strip away the politics and the controversy and focus on the people who actually do the science, and on the adventure. Hopefully, this will demystify the process, and make science start to feel a little less threatening. 

I had to start somewhere, and the story I knew the best was my own. So I'm beginning here, right now, with this book. Let's put the thrill back, and see if we can't start to make a difference.

I also think sometimes it's hard for people to imagine why "basic" research is valuable. Yet so often we find that our greatest advances come from unexpected places. 

I'm not pretending that my research is going to be that sort of an advance, but I do love the fact that a muddy-boots biologist studying dung beetles in a rainforest ended up being asked to speak at a national conference on cybersecurity, and was flown by the Navy to go visit an active duty aircraft carrier. How did that happen? But that's also the point. You never know where basic research will take you!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm writing a grant proposal to try to fund the next phase of research in my lab. My students made some startling discoveries with the rhinoceros beetles we're studying, and I think there are important new directions we now need to take our research. Just the latest sudden turn on our path to discovery!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Doug Emlen.

Q&A with Dr. Jack Stern

Dr. Jack Stern is the author of the book Ending Back Pain: 5 Powerful Steps to Diagnose, Understand, and Treat Your Ailing Back. A neurosurgeon, he has been on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical Center. He is based in White Plains, New York.

Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about back pain?

A: The most common misperception is that all back pain will resolve on its own. My book Ending Back Pain has sold thousands of copies because unfortunately, that is not always the case. Sometimes lower back pain is a symptom of a more serious condition or not related to the back at all.

Q: How did you decide on the structure of this book, and on the five steps you describe to treat back pain?

A: As an M.D. and neurosurgeon with a Ph.D. in cell biology, I wanted to write a book that, as much as possible, was based on the current scientific/medical literature.

What I didn't want to do is write a book that was an expression of my personal opinions or a book that advocates for a single treatment modality. The book shelves at your local book store are filled with such volumes.

In order to accomplish this goal, I realized that there were at least five features that needed to be considered and these became the “5 Steps.”

1. I called the first "Unlocking Your Back Pain Code.” In these chapters, I review the general characteristics of the variety of different types of back pain. Then using descriptions and a check list I engage the reader in a journey of self-discovery about their specific pain.

2. The second section educates the reader, now armed with some notion of the nature of their pain, how to deal with an increasingly unresponsive medical system to advocate for the care they need.

3. The third is probably the most important section. I stress that low back pain is a description of what ails you and NOT a diagnosis! 

Therefore I guide the reader, now prepared to face the challenges of the medical system, of what needs to be done to make the diagnosis. In lay terms "Which One of the Six Sources That Generate Back Pain is the One Causing My Pain!" 

Then, once we have a handle on the diagnosis, I review the most common treatments for each. Importantly, I do so from least to most invasive treatment and give references to the medical literature that support that treatment.

4. In the next section, I address how healing is possible in the many instances when, despite the best of efforts, a diagnosis can’t be made.

5. How to maintain a healthy back is the subject of the final section.

Q: How common is back pain, and do most people find a successful method to treat it?

A: Lower back pain is the most expensive, benign condition in industrialized countries. Experts have estimated that approximately 80 percent of Americans will experience lower back pain during their lifetimes. The annual prevalence of lower back pain is 15-45 percent with a point prevalence of approximately 30 percent.

Sixty percent of those who suffer from acute lower back pain recover in six weeks and up to 80-90 percent recover within 12 weeks; however, the recovery of the remaining patients with lower back pain is less certain.

About 2 percent of American workers suffer compensable back injuries each year—a staggering 500,000 cases. Lower back pain accounts for 19% of all workers' compensation claims in the United States.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: I am hoping that the reader develops a much better understanding of the cause of their pain and that with a proper diagnosis most everyone can be helped.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My colleagues and I are exploring the possibility that there is role for stem cells and the byproducts of stem cells in the treatment of degenerative disc disease. The possibility that these therapies may help millions of people is very exciting.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A; A large number of folks who have read the book as well as many who haven't have expressed an interest in consulting with me about their back pain.

Therefore, in the last year I began a second opinion consultation service. Folks can contact me with their medical records and MRIs, etc., which I will review.

I then contact them with my thoughts. They don't need to be in the New York area as I use video conferencing. Because, under no circumstances, will I take these folks on as patients. They get an unbiased, objective opinion based on my 35 years of experience.

To reach me, please visit my website. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 24

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 24, 1822: Matthew Arnold born.