A few days ago, my wife was seriously injured in a car accident about 60km east of Vientiane, Laos, while travelling alone. She suffered multiple fractures, including a spinal fracture. A few days later, I’m relieved to be able to report that she is in no danger of paralysis. After surgical repair in a hospital in northern Thailand, the worst is now over.

I am posting this from the airport in Taipei, during a long wait for a flight to Bangkok, on my way to Thailand to meet Kim, and take care of her for a few weeks before she can be flown home.

Publishing this website is more of a lifestyle than a business, and I will not stop working entirely. I wouldn’t want to, even in a crisis: my work is an anchor for me, and there were be long, quiet hours to tap away on the ol’ laptop while Kim rests and recuperates. At the same time, I think it’s safe to say that customer service emails will probably be a slower than usual, and some kinds of email will be deferred for weeks. If I can answer something quickly and easily, I will. If there’s a critical purchase issue, I will respond to that as soon as Thai internet connections will allow.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

The iPad will probably change publishing forever, finally making eBooks a reality. SaveYourself.ca will be there.

About a year ago, standing on a sidewalk on Davie Street in downtown Vancouver, I showed my parents an eBook-reading app on my iPhone.

Their eyes widened in fascination. There were exclamations, and a stream of questions. That’s an entire book? How did you get it? Do you have others? How many fit “in” there? Suddenly they really wanted to touch it. I had previously shown them other apps — productivity apps, utilities, novelties, games — with relatively little effect. They are readers, so it was a reading app that got their attention.

Days later, they both had their own iPod touches, and were actively experimenting with buying and reading eBooks They quickly became more experienced than I am with the (poor) state of digital publishing industry. The discovered that the reading apps — there are several excellent ones — were way ahead of the supply of eBooks. eBooks are currently easy to read … but somewhat hard to get, with relatively few books available and a maze of ecommerce and licensing complications, proprietary formats, security issues, and so on.

The writing is on the wall

A year later, though, they are more or less up and running with a steady diet of eBooks on their iPod touches. My sixty-something parents are constantly reading eBooks. They favour the reading app Stanza, and they get their books from the Fictionwise eBookstore. Although many say that they can’t read a screen comfortably, my parents say it’s great: the bright, high-contrast, backlit screen makes text pop out. The font and text size can be changed easily, and read in either portrait or landscape format.

I believe that this is what is known as “the writing is on the wall.” The eBook cometh. A decade later than music, but it’s finally happening.

The iPhone eBook reading App, Stanza, is now how my parents do most of their reading.

Correction: The writing is on the … iPad.

The eBook cometh because Apple cometh. The iPad is built for many things, but reading eBooks most of all. Apple is going to shake up the publishing industry the same way it shook up the music industry. I believe that the iPad will change the way people read.

This isn’t a technology website, so I’m not going to get into an argument with the people out there who are rolling their eyes at the iPad. They can say it’s “just” a big iPod touch all they like: the user experience is going to be excellent, and my parents will buy one, and so will an awful lot of other people. And eBooks will become a big deal, fast.

ePub format

Apple surprised everyone by supporting the ePub format for it’s new device. It was nicest thing to do: ePub is a free and open e-book standard. Although I have no doubt Apple and it’s partner publishers will have measures in place to protect their intellectual property, the use of the ePub format is progressive and promising.

It is a move clearly intended to democratize eBook publishing, to make it more by the people, for the people. As with digital music, it will tend to encourage decentralization of the industry, cut out middle-men, and probably put fatter shares of the profit in the hands of authors. Sound too good to be true? Literally the day after the announcement, Amazon significantly changed its profit-sharing, suddenly giving authors a much larger cut.

Why the sudden Amazonian generosity? Because they can read the writing on the wall, too. Because they can hear a freight train coming down the tracks they’re tied to.

SaveYourself.ca will definitely go iPad

My “tutorials” are book-sized web pages with some simple interactive pages. Sometimes I call them eBooks, because they are books, and they are electronic, but they are not really “eBooks” — they are web pages. There are some really great advantages to that format, so I have resisted selling my eBooks in the “traditional” eBook format — PDF — for years now.

I’ve always hated PDFs. They are awful to work with and maintain, and customers have all kinds of problems with them. I’ve never seen PDFs as the future of reading — they were just a Band Aid for the mess of document formats from the 80s and 90s, something to get by on. They were never good for serious screen reading, and never will be.

The ePub format on the iPad does look like the future of digital reading. So it’s time to publish the SaveYourself.ca books in ePub format. It is time to get ready for the future.

Traumeel® is a popular homeopathic Arnica ointment for aches and pains, with a strong reputation for being “good for” muscular pain, joint pain, bruising, and sports injuries.

But people believe in a lot of things that don’t work. What about Traumeel? Do fifty people who use it post-surgically obviously recover faster than fifty people who don’t? Has such a test even been properly done? Where’s the beef?

I’m pleased to announce a major new analysis of Traumeel, certainly one of the most detailed articles about Traumeel available anywhere. This is free content that adds substantially to the value of SaveYourself.ca tutorials and eBooks — virtually everyone with a chronic musculoskeletal problem has tried Traumeel, or been offered it. Now my readers can learn just about everything there is to know about it:

• How much Arnica is really in there? And does it matter? Does Arnica work even undiluted?
• How did homeopathic Arnica keep people from going out to dinner?
• If poison ivy were as diluted as the Arnica in Traumeel, could it still hurt you?
• NCCAM has massive funding to study and validate treatments like homeopathy, so what evidence have they produced with their millions?
• Can patients even tell if healing time was “accelerated”? Do people know what normal healing times are?

And much more!

So many customers have told me that I was under-charging that I finally decided to take them seriously.

I have never tinkered much with the pricing of my tutorials/eBooks. They’ve been USD $14.95 pretty much since I started selling them, about three years ago. Today I decided it was time to push them up to twenty dollars.

The value of the tutorials is not in their ability to cure. I do not offer “treatment systems” or miracle cures. SaveYourself.ca is not that kind of website.

What they do offer is critical analysis of all the treatment options — which often helps people choose to avoid unnecessary and costly therapy. This is why customers have told me that I’m under-charging: because I’ve assisted them out of the therapy grinder, helped them ditch treatments of dubious value, and helped them understand cheap or free self-help alternatives.

A few readers have even donated as much as $100 for this reason: because the information saved them from spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on many over-priced and under-proven therapies.

Now 90-day subscriptions!

Most scientific journals charge $30 to $50 to access a single article for a single day.

I’ve always wanted to offer a much better deal to my own customers. Thanks to improving technology, I’m now able to bump the subscription period up yet again, from 60 day to 90 days. Once customers have paid for access, customers can now visit the tutorial for three months!

And, as before, customers can renew their access inexpensively months or even years down the road, to regain access and find out what the latest science says. On average so far, tutorials are updated 10-20 times per year.

I just did a little bit more work reporting on Graston Technique®, in response to some comments and ideas from a reader (hat tip to Jay). Here’s a bit of what I’ve learned:

Curiously, in a strange case of licensing backfire, David Graston himself is no longer in control of the Graston Technique® brand; he markets a new system called Sound Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (SASTM®), distinguished primarily by the use of tools made from ceramic instead of steel. There's also a third fairly-well known example, ASTYM® (stands for “a stimulation”). I was not previously aware of these competing modalities.

They are all rather similar, of course — virtually indistinguishable from a patient’s point of view, certainly. Graston publishes a chart showing the differences between the systems, but virtually all the differences are system-marketing benefits.

One of the most noteworthy things about the Graston website is the lack of meaningful references to relevant science. When I learned of these other systems, I went to see if by any chance they offered any meatier scientific support for their sales pitches.

ASTYM publishes an impressive-looking research page with dozens of references. However, the references are all just basic science articles about the physiology of healing, stuff that’s tangentially relevant to ASTYM at best. This is somewhat like responding to the question “Does it work?” by saying, “I am smart. I can cite science papers about physiology.” That’s terrific, but … does it work?

The ASTYM folks prominently cite the same trivial Davidson et al article that the Graston website leans on.

They list only a single study that directly involved ASTYM in any way. However, despite being rather experienced at tracking down scientific papers, I was unable to find what they were citing — either it doesn’t exist, or isn’t correctly cited. And it’s a study of only 20 subjects in any case (smaller than small) — barely worth mentioning even if it is real.

So much for the impressive-seeming presentation.

Graston’s SASTM website does not present any scientific information whatsoever, but “To request a research packet, please fill out the contact us form.” Why not just publish it? Perhaps because there’s really nothing to publish?

The Graston Technique review is now updated with this information:

After a great surge of regular blogging these past few months, I’ve slowed down recently, and it’s going to stay that way for a while. This vexes me. On the one hand, I know that a good steady supply of posts is critical to earning and keeping an audience of appreciative readers (hey, everyone). I deeply respect and appreciate the writers I follow who post like clockwork.

And I have a different job than most writers on ye olde internets. My job is to produce really well-researched articles and information resources that evolve over time. I can’t post-and-forget. I have to post-and-integrate. Researchers at the University of Not Really demonstrated in a nonexistent study that my workload breaks down something like this, accurate to within five miles:

I’m not sure if I got my math right there, but you get the picture. It’s that second one that keeps me from posting new content as like-clockwork as I’d like. The cat doesn’t help much either.