Dr. Hepsharat Amadi

05/24/2026

In 1929, a young doctor named Cicely Williams arrived in West Africa with a medical bag, a curious mind, and no idea she was about to make one of the most important discoveries in child health history.

Children were dying by the thousands — toddlers, mostly. Swollen bellies. Skin that had lost its color. Hair that had gone brittle and pale. The official diagnosis was pellagra, a vitamin deficiency. The treatment wasn't working. The children kept dying.

Williams wasn't convinced. She performed autopsies at serious personal risk — once nearly dying herself from an infected cut. She studied the cases. She listened to the local women, who had a name for what they were seeing: kwashiorkor. "The disease the child gets when the new baby comes."

That name told the whole story. These weren't starving children. They were toddlers weaned too early — taken off breast milk when a sibling arrived, given maize-based diets without enough protein. A specific, treatable deficiency. Being diagnosed as something else. Being treated incorrectly. Every single time.

She published her findings in 1933. The leading expert on African nutrition dismissed her paper outright. She published again, more carefully, with detailed comparisons. She was ignored again — then transferred overseas as a form of professional punishment.

In her new posting, she found something even more disturbing. Companies were sending women dressed as nurses door-to-door, convincing new mothers that sweetened condensed milk was better for their babies than their own. This practice was already illegal in Europe. It was being aggressively marketed in communities where clean water was scarce and mothers had no way of knowing the risk they were taking.

Williams gave a lecture. She called it "Milk and Murder." She said that promoting formula this way in vulnerable communities was equivalent to criminal negligence — and that the resulting infant deaths should be treated as such. Powerful people were furious. Her career was nearly ended.

Then the Second World War arrived. Singapore fell. Cicely Williams was captured, imprisoned, tortured, and held for three and a half years. When the war ended in 1945, she was close to death in a hospital bed.

She recovered. And went back to work.

In 1948, she was appointed the first-ever head of Maternal and Child Health at the World Health Organization. She spent the next four decades advising more than 70 countries. In 1981 — nearly 50 years after her original paper — the WHO formally adopted international restrictions on exactly the kind of formula marketing she had called dangerous in the 1930s.

Cicely Williams died in 1992, aged 98. She had survived a prison camp, defied colonial medicine, outlasted an industry, and lived to see her life's work written into international law.

She didn't set out to be remembered. She set out to understand why children were dying — and to make it stop.

It took the world 60 years to catch up. But she never stopped waiting.

05/24/2026

She was twelve when she found the book hidden on a plantation. She was ninety when she finally proved every word of it was true.
Louisiana, 1930. A white girl named Sue Lyles was exploring her family's old plantation property when she discovered a book gathering dust. Published in 1853, the title read: 12 Years a Slave.
She opened it. And she couldn't look away.
The author was Solomon Northup — a free Black man from New York who had been kidnapped in Washington D.C. in 1841, sold into slavery, and forced to work Louisiana plantations for twelve brutal years. In 1853, after his miraculous rescue, he published his story. Graphic. Specific. Devastating.
Most people who read it might have been moved, then moved on.
Sue did something else entirely.
She recognized the places Northup described. The rivers. The towns. The plantation names. She knew this geography. At twelve years old, living in the segregated South where many white families were actively rewriting slavery's history, Sue asked a question that would consume her entire life:
Was this all true?
That question became a seventy-year mission.
Sue Eakin — her married name — became a teacher. A newspaper editor. She raised a family. But she never stopped researching Solomon Northup. She tracked down plantation records. Interviewed descendants — both of enslavers and the enslaved. Studied court documents. Walked the exact land Northup had described. Cross-referenced every date, every name, every transaction.
In her forties, while working full-time and raising children, she went back to school and earned her master's degree.
At sixty years old, she earned her PhD from Louisiana State University.
Her dissertation? The same book she'd picked up as a child.
She had proven Solomon Northup was telling the truth.
In 1968, when 12 Years a Slave was largely forgotten and rarely taught, Sue Eakin published the first extensively annotated scholarly edition. She added hundreds of footnotes — verifying facts, identifying real people by name, correcting the historical record with hard evidence.
She brought the book back from obscurity.
But she wasn't done.
In 2007, at nearly ninety years old, Sue published a second, even more comprehensive edition — incorporating decades of additional research, new discoveries, deeper verification.
Seventy years. One book. One truth. One promise kept.
Sue Eakin died on March 20, 2009, in the same Louisiana town where she was born. She was ninety years old.
She never saw what came next.
In 2013, director Steve McQueen released the film 12 Years a Slave — based directly on Solomon Northup's narrative and built on the scholarly foundation Sue Eakin had spent her life constructing.
The film was unflinching. Brutal. Honest. Impossible to look away from.
It was nominated for nine Academy Awards.
In 2014, it won Best Picture.
Accepting the award, Steve McQueen said: "I'd like to thank this amazing historian, Sue Eakin, who gave her life's work to preserving Solomon Northup's book."
She wasn't there. She had died four years earlier, never knowing her work would reach millions.
But without her, Solomon Northup's story might still be doubted. Still buried. Still dismissed.
A white girl in segregated Louisiana found a book at twelve. She crossed every social boundary of her time and place. She earned a doctorate at sixty. Published groundbreaking scholarship at eighty-eight. Died at ninety.
And four years later, her life's work won an Oscar and reached the world.
Solomon Northup told the truth in 1853.
Sue Eakin spent seventy years proving it.
And because she refused to stop, millions finally heard it.

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05/24/2026

Positive emotions like love and happiness can strengthen the immune system and heal illness.

Her name was Wang Xiao, and at twenty-four years old, she was running out of time.

Doctors told her she had roughly one year left to live unless she received a kidney transplant. She suffered from uremia, a severe condition where the kidneys stop filtering waste from the blood, slowly poisoning the body from the inside. Her family had already been tested. None of them matched. Every normal option had failed.

So Wang did something almost nobody around her would have dared to do.

In 2013, she posted a message inside an online cancer support group. Her words were painfully direct because she no longer had the luxury of pretending.

She was searching for a terminally ill man with her blood type who would be willing to marry her and donate his kidney after his death.

In return, she promised she would care for him through the rest of his illness with everything she had.

“I just want to live,” she wrote.

Most people would have scrolled past the message.

One man did not.

His name was Yu Jianping.

He was twenty-seven years old, a former business manager and university graduate whose life had already been devastated by myeloma, a serious cancer affecting plasma cells. He had gone through a bone marrow transplant once already. The cancer had returned. His father had sold the family home to pay medical bills. A girlfriend had left after the diagnosis. Yu had quietly stopped fighting emotionally long before he stopped breathing physically.

Then he saw Wang’s message.

Their blood types matched.

He responded with remarkable simplicity:

“I can marry you.”

They met in a park for the first time.

And something unexpected happened almost immediately.

They liked each other.

One day during an online conversation, Wang suddenly disappeared for a while. Then she replied with dark humor that perfectly captured her spirit:

“On dialysis now. My arm is fixated. Here is a single-handed monster.”

She sent him a video from the dialysis machine smiling despite the tubes and blood moving beside her.

Yu laughed.

He later admitted he had not truly laughed in a very long time.

On July 16, 2013, they officially registered their marriage with a formal written agreement.

The contract was practical and emotionally detached on paper.

They would not live together.
They would not combine finances.
Their families would not know about the arrangement.

If Yu died and his kidney matched, Wang would receive it. In exchange, she promised she would care for his elderly widowed father for the rest of the man’s life.

It began as a survival agreement between two people who believed death was approaching.

But life complicated the arrangement.

Wang started accompanying Yu to hospital appointments.
Yu cooked soup for her after dialysis sessions.
They walked hospital corridors together.
They joked about sickness and death with the strange humor people develop when they genuinely understand mortality.

Without realizing it fully, the contract slowly became love.

Then Yu needed another bone marrow transplant — one his family could not afford.

Wang refused to stand still.

She opened a small flower bouquet stall on the street. Beside every bouquet she placed handwritten cards explaining their story: two sick people trying to save each other one day at a time. Customers returned. Strangers spread the story. The tiny stall slowly became something much larger through simple human compassion.

Eventually, Wang raised around 500,000 yuan — more than $90,000 — for Yu’s surgery.

And then something almost impossible happened.

Yu’s condition stabilized after his second transplant.

Meanwhile, Wang’s dialysis treatments began decreasing. Doctors told her she might not need a kidney transplant after all.

The two people who met expecting death were somehow both still alive.

In February 2015, they held a real wedding celebration with friends and family who finally learned how their relationship had truly started. Not as a romance at first, but as two desperate people trying to save each other.

Their story later inspired the 2024 Chinese film, which won multiple national awards. Today, Wang and Yu run the “Yongsheng Flower” shop in Xi’an — built from the same flower stall Wang once used to raise money for the man she believed she would someday outlive.

People often describe stories like this as miracles.

And maybe they are.

But what makes this story feel unforgettable is not only that two sick people survived.

It is that Wang Xiao refused to surrender her sense of agency even when almost every normal path disappeared.

She wrote down exactly what she needed.
She asked honestly.
She found another person who was equally broken by circumstance.
Then they slowly gave each other reasons to continue fighting.

The kidney was never donated.

Because in the end, neither of them needed it.

They were too busy learning how to live.

05/22/2026

What are holistic dentists? 🦷

Check out Dr.Amadi | M.D. Women's Health’s video.

05/22/2026

05/18/2026

Brooklyn, 1952. Judith Love Cohen, 19, asks her high school counselor about math classes.
The counselor smiles like she’s talking to a child. “Honey, nice girls go to finishing school. Learn to pour tea.”

Judith enrolls in Brooklyn College. Engineering.
Hundreds in the lecture hall. Women: one. Her.
“Boys laughed when I raised my hand,” she said. “So I raised it higher.”

She transfers to USC. Finishes bachelor’s + master’s. Never sees another female engineering student.
Graduates 1957. Class of 800. Women: 8.
America’s engineers: 0.05% women. She’s one of them.

Then NASA calls.

1960s. Apollo needs brains. Gender? Secondary. Competence? Everything.

Judith joins the team building the Abort-Guidance System for the Lunar Module. The AGS. The “oh crap” button. If the main computer dies, this box flies you home. Or you don’t come home.

“It had to work,” she said. “Because if you needed it, you were already dying.”

Orbital mechanics. Electrical chaos. Code that can’t glitch. She lives in equations for months.

August 1968. Nine months pregnant. Still at her desk.
Coworkers: “Go home, Judith.”
Judith: “The math isn’t due. I am.”

Morning contractions start. She grabs her printouts — pages of trajectories, circuits, logic — and drives to work.
Contractions get real. Team: “HOSPITAL. NOW.”
Judith: “Fine.” Takes the printouts.

Hospital bed. Nurses walk in. She’s between contractions, scribbling on computer sheets. “Ma’am, you’re in labor.”
“I’m in math,” she says.

Then it clicks. The final bug in the AGS. Solved.
Then she pushes. Baby boy: Thomas Jacob. You know him as Jack Black.

Next day she calls her boss. “I fixed the guidance problem.” Pause. “Oh. And the baby came too.”

April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth. BOOM.

Apollo 13. Oxygen tank explodes. Command Module dying. Three men crawl into the Lunar Module — built for 2 people, 1 day. They need it for 3 people, 4 days.

Primary computer stutters.
Backup comes alive.
Judith’s AGS.

It holds. Calculates burns. Aligns spacecraft. Verifies they’re not flying into deep space forever. “Without AGS, we don’t come home,” said Jim Lovell later.

April 17, 1970. Splashdown. Alive.
The world cheers the astronauts.
Inside NASA, engineers hug. “The backup worked.”
Judith’s backup.

Apollo 13 crew visits TRW to say thanks. Judith shakes their hands. No speech. Back to work.

She keeps going.

Hubble Space Telescope systems. TDRS satellites — ran 40 years. Papers. Patents. Mentors girls. Writes kids’ books: You Can Be a Woman Engineer. “Girls need to see it to be it,” she said. “TV gave them lawyers. I’ll give them astronauts.”

Raised four kids. Danced ballet with the Met Opera while doing engineering school. “My first loves,” her son Neil wrote, “were dancing and equations.”

July 25, 2016. Age 82. She’s gone.
Son Jack Black posts 2019: Photo of Mom, 1959, next to a Pioneer spacecraft. “My mom literally helped save Apollo 13. Finished the problem IN LABOR WITH ME. How do you top that?”

The counselor said “finishing school.”
Judith chose “finishing equations.”
Three astronauts owe their lives to that choice.

“They said I didn’t belong,” Judith said once. “So I built something that belonged in space. And brought them home.”

She never flew. But she made sure others could.
From a hospital bed. Between contractions. With a pencil.

Digital Artwork | AI Generated Image by Fresh Mind |

05/13/2026

💚 Wellness Event Invitation — May 15–16 in Boca Raton 🌱 -

Hello, all!  I am excited to attend this upcoming event in Boca Raton, hosted by the supplement company Avini Health, for which I am a distributor. I am inviting all who are interested to attend. They are having a welcome reception on Friday 5/15 from 5 p.m. - 7 p.m. at the hotel where the event i...