Regardless, after I was forced to retire in 2010 because I lost a client that was responsible for 75% of our business, I started to write my memoir around 2017. Then I was obligated to reveal things about myself, otherwise I would feel insincere. Since I had already written my Newsletter, Leung’s (Chinese) Herb News from 1996 to 2004, I included all 42 issues of it with my Memoir and published all in a combined volume, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amazon, 2018). Together, they cover my personal and professional life and work over nearly nine decades. But I am not done yet. I believe we are about to enter another industry built on faux science. Which is driven by greedy, clueless gazillionaires and their followers towards new specialties based on vague healthcare ideas and confused products shaped by AI and other questionable sciences that even most leading scientists in the fields don’t understand. And we just plunge blindly in, propelled by greed, because everyone is doing it?
Most of my colleagues and friends (except a few who were close to me) did not know my problems. And I had/have quite a few. I have inattention (part of ADHD?), and get easily bored when in group conversations, especially in business and money matters that don’t concern or interest me. I often tune out and have no idea what others are saying.
I am very slow in reading, especially numbers. It takes me 3 or 4 times longer than most people to get a number with 5 or 6 digits right. Also, I’m very slow in going from my thinking to writing/speaking. Hence, I can never dictate to anyone (e.g., my assistants). And it takes me literally hours to write a couple of pages that would only take 20 or 30 minutes for others. That handicap prevents me from casually answering any texts. Which is why I don’t do social media other than LinkedIn. I might read ones that are forced on me because I don’t know how to block them from entering my phone. Now, I can’t even get back to LinkedIn on my laptop to post things, I have to post my documents on my blog from my phone access. Another consequence of my problem of being forgetful is that I can selectively/subconsciously blog certain things less important to me than others at a particular moment. For example, I was interviewed by Dan Van Atta which was published on September 30, 2004 in New York Academy of Sciences blog. That was when I was in the middle of my grant research, among other important activities worldwide, I only discovered my interview a few weeks earlier when I searched for something online. This article popped up, and I had totally no recollection of having given that interview. But it was all true, except no pharmacologist automatically specializes in pharmacognosy. On the other hand, a pharmacognosist can also be a pharmacologist if he/she wants to see how a particular natural medicine works.