Dear friends and colleagues,
I suspect that perhaps at least some of you will consider taking advantage of various sales over the next few weeks to buy gifts for your loved ones. I would like to ask you for a favor- please make your next purchase on Amazon Smile instead of Amazon. If you do so, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchase to a charity of your choice. You do not incur any cost, Amazon takes care of all associated fees.
Using Amazon Smile is easy: follow this link http://smile.amazon.com/ch/61-1776673, and then continue shopping as usual. Please do this every time you shop -go through Amazon Smile using the link above- instead of Amazon. We also ask you to please kindly share this request with your family and friends. We believe a collective effort will make a huge difference.
If you designate Physicians for Ancestral Health as your charity, that would allow us to provide scholarships for medical students and residents interested to attend 2018 PAH Winter Retreat in San Diego. The goal of our organization is to provide education about Ancestral Health principles to medical students, residents, and physicians worldwide. That’s a worthy goal. Incorporation of Ancestral Health principles into conventional medicine worldwide will change the medicine of the future and improve the health of nations.
I would like to illustrate why scholarships for medical students and residents are important. Tommy Wood, MD, PhD, benefitted from such a scholarship when he attended the PAH retreat in 2015 as a student at Oslo University in Norway. He gave a fantastic presentation, (which can be viewed on YouTube) and is now a PAH President-Elect. Victoria Prince attended our first retreat in 2013 as a medical student and since then she has given presentations at multiple conferences, including at Ancestral Health Symposium New Zealand – Ancestral Health in Academic Medicine: More than Just So Stories
If we have extra funds left after student and resident scholarships have been allocated, then we have two needs that would benefit from additional funding.
- Being able to pay a videographer to record PAH presentations for our website and YouTube channel. We offer the videos from our retreats to the general public free of charge even though there is a significant cost to our organization to be able to provide such a service. We would like to be able to continue providing such public service.
- We would like to be able to offer at least a small stipend to our esteemed speakers who kindly agreed to pay for all of their travel expenses and retreat registration fees to give a presentation at the Winter Retreat in San Diego. However, taking in account time off work, this adds a financial burden to the speakers. We would love to offset some of their expenses. Unfortunately, our current budget does not allow us to do that.
All our revenue comes from member dues (which are intentionally kept very low to decrease the barrier to entry). As an organization, we made a decision not to accept any sponsors or vendor donations to avoid commercial bias. This, however, restricts us financially. So we came up with Amazon Smile as a creative way to raise some funds without asking for donations and being able to maintain our integrity.
Having additional revenue from Amazon Smile would literally bring a smile to many faces: students, residents, people all over the world watching presentations on YouTube, and of course our presenters.
Thank you for your support.
Best wishes,
Polina Sayess, MD
President, Physicians for Ancestral Health