Author, Survivor and Game-Changing Doc Goldner Encourages You to Lean Into Your ‘Origin Story'
Jun. 19, 2022
How did you get to where you are today? I was diagnosed with lupus at 16. I was already in stage 4 kidney failure by the time the doctors realized what was wrong. It took two years of high doses of medication including chemotherapy to save my kidneys and my life. I became fascinated with the human body, which led to my decision to become a physician.
I lived a life very mindfully, focused on enjoying every moment. When I met my husband, I was just graduating medical school, in spite having had of a scary relapse of lupus that caused multiple mini-strokes. He loved me so much, and he wanted to marry me even though I had an illness that we believed would prevent me from having children and would lead me to become disabled and likely die young. He is a scientist himself, obsessed with learning the optimal nutrition for fat loss, and when I asked him to train me for our wedding, he modified his protocol for me. I was the only vegetarian he had ever worked with.
I went from a size 11 to a size 3 in three and a half months. I also became lupus-free — normal blood tests and zero symptoms. Even my kidney function returned to normal. After we had our first child — after four years of health, without any recurrence of lupus — we realized something important had happened: I was not just in remission but truly healthy.
We studied the changes in my diet and how it would impact not only cellular metabolism but cellular repair and immune function, and then tested it in volunteers with lupus. We discovered that my results were entirely reproducible, and we knew we had to release our finding and teach the public. We decided to release our entire protocol for free as public service.
Over the past decade we have helped thousands all over the world reverse not only lupus, but a multitude of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and recently Covid long-haul syndrome. The news of what we were doing spread entirely organically. I went from having fewer than 100 followers on Facebook to over 159,000 on social media platforms and growing every day. I am regularly called upon to comment on health issues, and recently became a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board. I have three bestselling books, including my first, Goodbye Lupus, published without any public announcement, which became a bestseller before it was printed. I continue to teach for free online, with daily posts to keep people informed and inspired — with regular free online Q&A sessions for the public.
I believe my experiences as a patient, my credibility as a physician, my dedication to serving others at no cost, and, most importantly, my continued results at reversing diseases, have all led me to where I am today.
Whom do you credit? I credit my parents for keeping me positive and focused on my life and my future while I was sick with lupus. Especially my mother, who was by my side for every treatment, reminding me that I did have a future and I had to keep up my studies because I was going to make it. She also taught me the value of service, starting me out volunteering at the hospital at 14. I still value service and volunteer my time to teach and support people all over the world who are sick and need my help. I credit my husband Thomas Tadlock for saving my life with his knowledge of nutrition and with his incredible love. I credit my disease with teaching how to persevere, how to find joy in the moment even when my body was hurting, how strong I really am — and for leading me to this life where I get to save countless others from otherwise devastating diseases so they too can live the life they truly want.
What lessons have you learned that might enlighten and inspire others? Our greatest and most devastating pain can lead to our greatest gift to the world. I always tell my patients and my kids, that superheroes always have a painful origin story. So when something bad happens, it isn’t the end; it’s your origin story. It’s where you discover your powers. For more information: goodbyelupus.com
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THE SOUTHERN SMOKE Foundation, established by chef Chris Shepherd, has only been around for seven years — but that's long enough to have helped hospitality workers through hurricanes, freezes, a pandemic, and countless other personal situations requiring emergency relief.
The group says that food and beverage workers lose an average of $1,175 in income during a natural disaster; its goal is to provide assistance in the form of grants to those affected. This time around, it's getting a big assist from Pappas Restaurants, which donated $75,000 in the wake of Beryl and has plans to give more via a continued partnership.
Additionally, the Houston Hospitality Alliance gave $25,000, and an anonymous donor pledged to match $25,000. And DoorDash stepped up, offering grant recipients "community credits" to ensure that meals and essential groceries and household items can be delivered at no cost.
After the derecho in May, SSF granted $330,600 in funds to 372 food and beverage workers. The deadline to apply for Beryl-related assistance is Aug. 16, and turnaround time from application receipt to release of funds is around two weeks. The nonprofit issued its first grants a couple weeks ago to workers at Dandelion Cafe; a touching segment aired on Good Morning America.
“We are so grateful to our partners,” said Lindsey Brown, SSF executive director. “As of July 1, 2024, we’ve distributed more than $1 million in emergency relief grants to food and beverage workers in crisis nationwide. We distributed $1 million in grants during the entirety of 2023 and are on pace to more than double our grants to F+B workers this year. The generous support from our partners like Pappas Restaurants, the Houston Hospitality Alliance, and DoorDash help us to be a safety net for such a fragile industry, and we welcome support from anyone else who loves food and beverage and wants to not only see the industry survive but thrive.”
To make a donation to SSF, click here.
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THROUGHOUT THE HOT — and hopefully hurricane-free — months of summer, visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston can step through a portal and experience another era with Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan, on view through Sept. 15.
Organized by the Japanese Art Society of America and co-curated by Bradley Bailey, Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao curator of Asian art at the MFAH, this expansive exhibit is installed thematically, rather than chronologically, across several galleries on the upper level of the Caroline Wiess Law Building. The show features more than 150 objects borrowed from 70-plus public and private collections, including several newly discovered masterworks of Japanese art, many of which have never been shown publicly. The curatorial vision here is extraordinary; Meiji Modern will simultaneously reaffirm and explode any preconceived ideas you have about Japanese art.
The exhibit’s title refers to the 50 years of Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912), named after the country’s first monarch, who ruled from 1867 to his death as Japan transformed itself from an isolationist, feudal country into a nation-state and one of the great powers of the modern world. In a statement, Bailey describes Japan during that time as “one the first non-Western nations seeking to repel colonization by making the case for the integrity of its art and culture.”
But “repel” may be too narrow a word. Throughout the exhibit’s over 150 paintings, woodblock prints, historic photographs, cloisonné enameled vases, bronze sculptures, crystal balls, and folding screens, one sees a sometimes tense, sometimes joyful, sometimes propagandized amalgamation of Japan’s ancient traditions and the Western promise of 19th-century modernity, which included new techniques and concepts in art.
Mitsutani Kunishirō’s European tutelage is apparent in his 1910 watery oil-on-canvas portrait “Flowers,” where a woman, seated outdoors on a wooden veranda, and dressed in a traditional kimono and with two flowers in her lap, strikes a languid pose against a mysterious background of undulating, deep green foliage, like an incongruous underwater garden. It’s a painting that would sit nicely between one of Monet’s “Water Lillies” and John Singer Sargent’s en plein air masterwork, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.”
Kano Hogai's 'Two Dragons in Clouds,' 1885
'Hell Courtesan,' c. 1900, one of a pair of six-panel screens by Utagawa (Baidō) Kokunimasa
Mitsutani Kunishiro's 'Flowers'
Hashiguchi Goyo's 'Poster for Mitsukoshi'
Gender roles evolved during the Meiji era, and the fashion of the time followed — but the kimono is present in several woodblock prints of women enjoying new freedoms and technologies.
In Shodo Yukawa’s “Telephone Call: A Merchant’s Wife,” an elegant, kimono-clad woman has pushed a pink floor-to-ceiling curtain aside to access a wall telephone, her ear cocked coquettishly toward the handheld receiver. Meanwhile, the men are represented by a bowler hat woven entirely out of bamboo reeds. (You will do a double-take when you see it.)
Other works that will stop you in your tracks include a stunning image of a polar bear made with embroidered silk by an unknown Japanese artist. (The creation of modern zoos in Japan began during the Meiji era.)
And then there’s the woodblock print, “Tokugawa Shogun Viewing Watermelon Fight at Hama Palace” by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, which depicts exactly what the title describes: a churning ocean bay filled with two teams of imperial boatmen swimming furiously as they attempt to grab and collect dozens of floating and super slippery watermelons.
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