From the Desk

Available Here!

Pacific Book Review

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Award

The world had just exited the worst pandemic in a century when a small African village in the Olduvai region — the birthplace of human evolution — is consumed by death in a few hours. All indications point to a new infectious agent, as death spreads rapidly across the continent. Mensa-minded Dr. Catherine Montoya, the CDC Director, calls Jack Cann, a 45-year-old virology Ivy League rock star, now a professor at his Midwestern alma mater, to lead the team working to identify the cause. The NSA suspects it’s a genetically-altered, weaponized virus created by the North Koreans, tested in Olduvai, now out of control. While the world prepares for war, Jack and Seal Team 2 covertly search for evidence in a remote North Korean biowarfare lab, while Jack’s wife, anthropologist Dr. Marla Qui, discovers the critical clue: the pattern of death follows man's evolutionary migratory path out of Africa, and is now headed toward India and Asia. The research team discovers something more terrifying than any virus: a genetic “kill switch” hiding dormant within the human genome since the dawn of evolution, threatening all civilization, leaving them racing against the clock to save their own lives. 

Optioned by SONY Pictures in 2014!

Based upon the post-COVID revision of Olduvai Countdown, the screenplay is a high-octane careen that begins when a genetic "kill switch” lying deep in the human genome, inactive, since the dawn of man’s evolution, is activated — just after the world had exited COVID.  The NSA sends SEAL Team 2 and Jack Cann, a world renown scientist into North Korea on a suicide mission to recover a suspected  genetically-altered, weaponized virus created by the North Koreans, tested in Olduvai, now out of control.  As humanity's existence is threatened yet again, Jack Cann and his wife, Marla Qui lead a global team on a desperate search for a cure.

The first edition of the book, Olduvai Countdown, was optioned by SONY Pictures in 2014, expiring in 2018. The new screenplay is available to option, and is based upon the updated version of the novel. Please contact us for information.

Book Two in the Jack Cann trilogy.

Petroleum personnel returning from Brazil develop an insidious form of dementia that rapidly evolves into an irreversible catatonic-like state. Not dead. Not alive. A few isolated cases evolve into a national health and security crisis, as multitudes of healthy Americans are immobilized by the unknown affliction. President Carlos de Santos' government is bizarrely uncooperative with the U.S. in requests for information related to similar headaches — but without progression — in the entire Brazilian population. The outward appearance of an infectious agent causing the disease results in Jack Cann, the world-renowned Midwestern virologist, and his Asian-American wife, anthropologist Marla Qui, leading teams on two continents in a terrifying—and dangerous—hunt for the cause. Marla uncovers long-hidden horrors in the Amazon and finds herself methodically pursued by unknown killers, while Jack narrowly escapes a brash assassination attempt in the U.S. The seemingly unrelated findings of Jack, Marla, and their teams coalesce into a complex, chillingly opportunistic plot by Brazil to take over the United States—the confirmation of which relies on a teaspoon of dirt from a mass grave.

A Joint Commission best seller. - over 13,300 copies sold!

From the Foreword by Michael Pertschuk, the most aggressive Federal Trade Commission Chair in history in pursuing health-jeopardizing marketing and promotion.

"In the summer of 2006, I had a medical emergency—not life threatening, but something of a medical puzzle—that brought me by ambulance on July 4 to St Vincent’s, our local Santa Fe hospital emergency room. Later that day, Dr. Woods came to see me and admitted me as his patient. Two days later I was dis- charged.

I had never been to this hospital before and knew little about it, including what to expect in the level and nature of care there. What I experienced throughout those two days, as I reflect back upon them, was an unexpected—almost startling—manifestation of the very kind of treatment that Mike Woods advocates in this vanguard book.

As Mike Woods treated me and we talked, I learned about the first edition of this book and read it with keen interest. And there I found the very description of what I had experienced: doctors who are respectful, caring, transparent, and self-reflective and who have a decidedly un-godlike readiness to have their tentative diagnosis challenged by their peers.

There is ample wise counsel in this book, some of which provides a specific antidote to medical training and acculturation, but much of which applies to all of us, health care provider and patient alike. For example, I can’t help but to note how cleansing it would be to search and replace “health care provider” in this book with my own profession, “lawyer,” and circulate its wise counsel to my fellow lawyers, and a few other professionals who have lost their humanity—and any trace of humility—along the way.

A Joint Commission best seller - over 70,000 copies sold!

Editor and Contributor

If a patient, because of a cultural “disconnect,” can’t appreciate what we’re prescribing or why it’s necessary, or if the information is delivered in a way that inadvertently

frightens or offends the patient, how can we fulfill our mission as health care providers?

Take a minute to think of the patient as a customer —how would that change our behavior? We’d be obliged to give the patient what he or she wants. Doing that (within the boundaries of the right medical solution, of course) means being sensitive to each patient’s culture-driven expectations.

Each section addresses a few core cultural patterns that can lead to misunderstandings. By using this guide, physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals can take an important step toward better patient relationships.

From the Foreword by Albert W. Wu, M.D., M.P.H., Director of Strategic Collaborations at Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality

Dr. Woods is very likeable, and there is much to like in his writing. He follows Yeats’ advice to “think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.” He uses humor and plain language to provide a series of examples, some of good, but mostly of awful communication. The bad ones make you wince with the pain of recognition, sometimes at colleagues, other times at yourself.

Today, more than ever, trainees and practicing physicians need to understand the messages of this book. The ground is shifting under our feet. The practice of medicine has become increasingly hazardous, both for patients and to some extent for practitioners.

From the Foreword by Marshall Goldsmith, a leadership expert and author of New York Times best sellers MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It! (2010) and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007).

This great book, Civil Leadership: The Final Step to Achieving Safety, Quality, Innovation, and Profitability in Health Care, is built on, among other things, the foundations of Peter Drucker’s four basic competencies of leadership, Warren Bennis’s four lessons of self-knowledge, and Chris Argyris’s four core values of individuals. These fundamental concepts lead me to ponder a central dimension of the effective leader as foretold by Drucker several years ago: “Leaders of the past knew how to tell. Leaders of the future must know how to ask.” A significant attribute of civil leadership is “to ask” others for feedback in order to gain self-knowledge.