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Every New Year, those of us involved with IPT pledged to ourselves and sometimes to each other that surely this year things will really begin to happen, surely this year we will succeed in getting the word out, and IPT will finally catch on. And every year we would tell ourselves that IPT is medicine of the twenty-first century. Indeed, with the timing of this website, that will be true.
I have visited Donato 3 in San Diego and Tijuana many times over the years since SANA and MRF broke up. And I have been in contact with Dr. SGA from time to time. E-mail has helped everyone stay in touch.
In 1997, I visited Donato 3, and we came up with the idea of doing a website for IPT. Originally, we thought that it might be just a site providing information about his practice. But we still felt burned from our SANA/MRF experiences, shy about making any more formal arrangements. And I felt that such a site would not tell the IPT story in a big enough manner. So my ideas evolved into making the site independent and comprehensive and noncommercial.
In 1997, Dr. SGA and the Donatos made a presentation of IPT to the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In Fall of 1998, I ran into the acting head of the OAM at a conference at Stanford. I mentioned IPT, and he immediately recalled that they had been very impressed with it. He said that he hoped more work could be done to test it, and he wished me luck on the website. They have been asked back in September of 2000.
I talked a lot about doing the site, for months, and I confess to some conscious and unconscious procrastination. Planning a site like this is a bit overwhelming. It's not just the urgency, or the large amount of material to organize. It's the prospect of going public with something that is bound to make some waves, that indeed needs to make waves. And it's realizing the immense implications if IPT turns out to be for real, and the terrible consequences of each day of delay -- more and more Titanics going down. That's enough to make anyone feel apocalyptic, and both galvanized and paralyzed at the same time.
So here I am at the end of Act 2, or the beginning of Act 3. Taking this time to write and create this website feels like the showdown: fighting off the distractions of work, of daily life and of my other projects, dealing with the pain and disappointments of the past, suppressing the urges to procrastinate and go to a movie or attend yet another fascinating seminar at Stanford, or waste time looking for a girlfriend. So here I am persevering, wading through all this information, and crafting it into something coherent. And having no idea what will happen when I finally take IPTQ public on the web. Well, actually, lots of ideas, and hopes, but no way to tell what will really happen. Who will see the site? Who will respond? Who will resist? Who will be lost? Who will be saved? Will there be a girl? What adventures will happen? How will it turn out? This is a pregnant moment for me, standing at the doorway, preparing to go through. Each moment, each action, splits the outcome onto different possible tracks, parallel universes. Quantum physics in real life.
Probably the one thing that most effectively spurred me to action, to finally creating this site, was what happened when I told a friend, Donna McDermott, who was slowly dying of fairly advanced breast cancer, about IPT. She decided to try it, rather than endure the potential devastation of surgery and radiation and standard high dose chemotherapy. And over a period of a few months, it worked. Starting from the very first IPT treatment, she felt better and better. The cancer is now apparently gone, and she is well, with hair, organs, and health intact, in fact better health than ever. Her recovery and expressions of gratitude made all my years of SANA/MRF efforts and traumas worth going through. Read IPTQ.org's exclusive interview with Donna McDermott. This positive experience makes me want to try for more such positive experiences. How about millions of them? Most of whom I will never know. I can't imagine what that could be like, but I'm looking forward to it.
So here, at last, is IPTQ...
With love and caring...
For you.
-- Chris Duffield February 14, 1999
