We obtained all the information from Dr. Paul Garfinkel, who was the leading authority back in the early 1980s.
First, I should say that we had two psychiatrists, psychologists, art therapists, and nutritionists, all these people, as part of our program. We had 30 people, so there was a lot of information. They said that it was going to take about three months to get this information to make a partial hospitalization program. At that time, it was a new thing. We're talking about 15 years ago.
I'm hearing a lot of things today that I heard 15 years ago, so not a lot is changing in this whole industry, which absolutely upsets me—I have to hold myself down—because we have to get changes. We can talk about these things. Education is fantastic. I'm told that when Obama got into power he made it law that every doctor had to go through an eating disorder course. So on education, no question.
However, when we got this information from Paul Garfinkel.... In fact, I called him up because my psychiatrist said that it was going to take me three months to pull this stuff together because we had to get it out of the library in Toronto, at the university. Paul Garfinkel said, “Well, what do you need?” I told him and he said, “Oh, that paragraph is in volume 2 on page 27”. He went through the whole thing. Now, he wasn't 100%, but he cut off three months of work. We put it together from that. It probably cost us $200,000 or $300,000 to put a protocol together.
That's what we gave to Homewood in Guelph, which nicely gobbled it up. We had a contract with them. They just took all the information.... It sent us into a bit of turn-spin, because we wanted to open in the U.S. They wanted five things from us. They wanted cutting-edge, which they didn't have. They wanted something that was reproducible, which they didn't have. They wanted something that had a licence, which we thought was a joke. We got the first licence in the State of New York. I could tell you how we got it, but I won't take the time. We really went to the top.
I said that we had a meeting with Hillary Clinton. That was a big feat, too, because we went there to help with mental health parity. I ran into somebody who asked if we had seen Hillary Clinton. When I said no, that she couldn't come out, she took my hand, walked over to a woman and said, “This is Art Boese of Avalon, a friend of mine, and he wants to meet with Hillary Clinton.” Ten minutes later she came back and said, “How about 12:30?” I looked at her and said, “Tomorrow at 12:30?” My wife was with me, I asked her if she thought we could make it, and we had a one-on-one with Hillary Clinton in a room with probably 1,000 people in it. We were in the centre, one-on-one with Hillary Clinton.
I asked that, and she said, “Art, I'm 100% behind you.” I went from there and said that I had two more things. One of them was comprehensive care centres so that patients could move at the rate of the patients' health, not at the whim of the HMOs or the outpatient therapist who keeps them too long.
As I mentioned, we saved 1,000 lives. You hear other things, such as where we've talked to 17,000 people, and that's a wonderful thing, except that we got them when they had failed already from the one-on-one outpatient.... It's important that we have something so that when they do in fact go into.... Normally what happens is that you go from outpatient. Your electrolytes are off and your weight is down. You go into the hospital and they put the weight back on.
The patient thinks, “Wow, did I get help.” But the psychiatrist there checks it off and says, “Oh, Sally was in there.” That's about it. Then she goes back and she fails: now she won't go back into a treatment program.
Somebody called me yesterday before I came out here and said that their daughter had gone to Avalon Hills in Arizona. She had been around for about two years, almost dying everywhere. Anyway, she came out of there feeling great. She went back to her doctor, and her doctor said, “Well, get on the scale and let's have a look.” She went straight back into program. That's all it takes. The education is so important. I always agree that it's important, but we have to do something.
We don't have programs here. We have nothing in Canada, nothing at all. I could scream at the top of my lungs. I work so hard. I work seven days a week. I can tell you that I went through $3 million of my money in this thing, and I see things not moving ahead. I hear the same things that I heard 15 years ago, and I went to a lot of clinical meetings.
I'm sorry to go on like this. Terence, you tell me to keep quiet.