Blog Archives
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature blends social criticism, philosophy, and spiritual reflection. Author Chet Shupe argues that human beings were shaped for intimate, interdependent life, but civilization pulled us away from that design by teaching us to live for rules, institutions, and imagined futures instead of felt reality. Across chapters on emotional pain, language, law, marriage, war, and “spiritual home,” he keeps returning to one core claim: modern life has cut us off from our emotional intelligence and from one another, and that loss sits underneath much of our loneliness and distress.
Shupe does not tiptoe around his thesis. He states it, circles it, pushes it harder, then looks at it from another angle. At times, that gives the book a sermon-like intensity. I could not deny the force of his voice. He writes like someone who has been sitting with these ideas for a very long time and has reached the point where he needs to say them plainly. When he describes modern life as a place of compliance, emotional repression, and spiritual homelessness, the book can feel stark, even severe, but it doesn’t feel half-hearted.
I found myself both pulled in and pushing back. That was part of the value of reading it. Shupe’s contrast between “spiritual obligations” and legal ones, and his argument that language helped turn humans away from the present and toward anxious future-control, are bold ideas. They are also sweeping ones. I didn’t agree with every leap, but even then, I kept thinking. The book has that effect. It presses on sore spots most people already know are there: loneliness, numbness, strained relationships, the strange emptiness that can sit underneath a well-organized life. In that sense, this book works less like a tidy argument and more like a long, insistent conversation that wants to shake you awake.
I would recommend this book most to readers who enjoy reflective nonfiction that is willing to be provocative, speculative, and deeply personal in its philosophy. If you like books of social critique that overlap with psychology and spirituality, and you do not need every argument to arrive in a strictly academic package, there is a lot here to wrestle with. Readers who are open to a candid, searching, sometimes repetitive, often arresting meditation on what modern life has cost us will probably find it worth their time.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0FVPQJZCX
War Is Ugly
Nurse Florence®, How Bad are Health Problems from Agent Orange? follows curious students and a compassionate nurse as they unravel the history, science, and human cost of Agent Orange in a clear and accessible conversation. What inspired you to frame such a heavy historical and medical topic through a conversation between children and Nurse Florence?
One of my previous careers was helping Veterans with their benefits. I met people during that time who were affected by Agent Orange and thought their grandkids would be interested in knowing more about the condition.
How did you decide which Agent Orange–related illnesses to include, and how did you balance scientific accuracy with accessibility for young readers?
I used a VA education website to decide on the topics to include and tried to simplify each health condition.
What was the most challenging aspect of presenting emotionally difficult material in a calm, age-appropriate way?
Because science teaches people to observe their environment, it helps a person be less emotional through observation. I choose to focus on science facts and avoid long discussions about why there was a Vietnam War.
What do you hope young readers, educators, and families take away from this book about history, health, and the human impact of war?
War is ugly, and we should use all diplomatic channels to avoid it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises®
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Focused on the Science
Nurse Florence®, What is Acne? follows three curious friends as Nurse Florence transforms a simple question about pimples into an empowering, science-based journey through the causes, types, and treatments of acne. What inspired you to create the Nurse Florence® series as a way to teach health concepts to children?
During the COVID pandemic, I wanted to help supplement my children’s science education and thought that if I wrote a kids’ book series, then that would help. “The kids would have to read it since Dad wrote it.”
How did you determine which scientific terms were appropriate and accessible for elementary-age readers?
I use the concept of intellectual stimulation with my readers, which is borrowed from transformational leadership. I choose to believe that my readers can understand complex ideas as long as they are broken down a bit.
Acne can be an emotional topic. How did you balance scientific detail with empathy in your storytelling?
I tried not to focus on the emotions teenagers may have with acne and instead stayed focused on the science about the condition.
Are there other health topics you’re excited to explore with Nurse Florence® in future books?
I love writing all Nurse Florence® books and love this journey I am on of lifelong learning as I research topics and generate material to teach young people about their bodies.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
Community Feelings
Nurse Florence, What Do Hormones Control? introduces children to the powerful world of hormones through an engaging, beautifully illustrated conversation that makes complex biology clear, friendly, and fun. What inspired you to frame the science of hormones as a casual conversation in a school lunchroom?
When I started the series, the first book’s setting was in the nurse’s office. I thought about where else a school nurse could interact with kids and decided the lunch room was appropriate, as well as the school classroom. I know it seems a little strange for elementary kids to approach the school nurse at lunch, but I want nurses to appear approachable and trusted.
How did you decide which hormonal functions were most important, and most age-appropriate, to feature for young readers?
The source document I used from the Cleveland Clinic highlighted the hormones I discussed in the book.
Were there any scientific concepts you found especially challenging to simplify without oversimplifying?
The chemical structures of amino acids. I choose to just leave drawings of all the structures and let it be left for another book to go into detail about the structure of molecules.
What do you hope children (and the adults reading with them) will feel or understand differently after finishing this book?
I hope kids, parents, and grandparents, as well as aunts and uncles, will feel empowered as they read these books together. I hope to help bring community feelings back to our community.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
Curious Questions
Nurse Florence, Tell Me About Adipose Tissue follows three girls talking with the school nurse at lunch, who want to learn what purpose body fat serves in keeping the body working. Why was this an important book for you to write?
The Nurse Florence® series explores the curious questions that people have about the body, so this book serves to answer the questions some may have about adipose or fat tissue.
With the human body being so complex, and some areas doing many jobs, how do you determine what medical facts to include in your books?
Sometimes, it’s just intuition about what should be included and what should be left out. All of the books can’t be 100 pages long, so we just have to choose to cover different concepts in multiple books.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I was surprised to learn myself that adipose tissue produces some hormones, so if I thought that was interesting, then I thought others would find that interesting as well.
What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Nurse Florence, Tell Me About Adipose Tissue?
The human body is complicated, and it’s ok to learn new things about the body for all our lives.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Series | LinkedIn | Amazon
Modern Medicine
Doctor AI examines the failures of modern healthcare and proposes a bold future where intelligent digital health agents help rebuild trust, empower patients, and deliver a new model of care called Health 4.0. Was there a particular moment in your career when you realized the healthcare system needed fundamental change?
It wasn’t one moment. It was a pattern I saw over many years practicing medicine—working with surgeons, clinicians, and hospital staff during COVID to maintain surgical services, and later inside Johnson & Johnson in global medical technology.
As a surgeon, I witnessed how extraordinary modern medicine can be. We can reopen blocked arteries, remove tumors, and save lives in situations that would have been fatal a generation ago.
But I also saw something troubling: many of the diseases we treat in hospitals have been developing quietly for years before anyone intervenes.
Our system is designed to react to a crisis rather than protect health.
That realization stayed with me. Doctor AI grew out of a simple question: what would healthcare look like if we designed the system around protecting health instead of reacting to illness?
What do you see as the most serious structural failure in American healthcare today?
The most serious structural failure is that the system rewards the treatment of illness rather than the preservation of health.
Nearly every incentive—financial, regulatory, and operational—is aligned around events: diagnoses, procedures, hospitalizations. Yet most major diseases develop over long biological trajectories before symptoms appear.
As a result, we invest enormous resources in rescue medicine while systematically underinvesting in the earlier stages where prevention and trajectory management could change outcomes.
This misalignment also erodes trust. Patients feel the system is reacting to problems rather than helping them stay healthy. Clinicians feel trapped in a model that measures productivity rather than meaningful health outcomes.
Until we realign incentives toward protecting health over time, technological advances alone will not solve the deeper problems.
What does the term “Health 4.0” mean, and what would a Health 4.0 system look like in everyday life for patients?
I use the term Health 4.0 because healthcare has evolved in stages.
- Health 1.0 was the era of heroic medicine—doctors working with limited tools, treating illness when it appeared.
- Health 2.0 introduced modern hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and large healthcare institutions.
- Health 3.0 brought digital infrastructure—electronic health records, imaging, and large data systems. But those systems still largely react to disease after it appears.
Health 4.0 is different.
It uses artificial intelligence, continuous data, and personalized biology to manage health as a trajectory over time.
In everyday life, that means:
- Early detection of disease risk
- Personalized prevention strategies
- AI systems helping clinicians synthesize complex information
- Less time navigating fragmented systems
- More focus on staying healthy
In short, healthcare becomes continuous and preventive, rather than episodic and reactive.Instead of interacting with healthcare primarily during moments of crisis, people would experience it as a continuous partnership that supports their health throughout life.
What risks do we face if healthcare reform does not keep pace with technological change?
Technology is moving very quickly—especially artificial intelligence. But if we simply layer new technology onto a poorly designed healthcare system, we risk making existing problems worse.
Costs could continue to rise. Trust could continue to decline. And families may still face a frightening reality in America today: that a medical encounter can threaten their financial future.
The promise of technology should be better health and affordable care.
If we design the system correctly, digital health agents and AI could help us detect disease earlier, reduce unnecessary costs, and allow families to seek care without fearing financial ruin.
But that only happens if we rethink the architecture of the system itself.
That is the central idea behind Health 4.0.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | LinkedIn | Substack | Facebook | Instagram | Amazon
Drawing from medicine, technology, and systems design, Doctor AI reveals how state-of-the-art digital healthcare can restore trust and autonomy to the individual while reducing systemic waste. Blackstone shows how intelligent, transparent technology can shift health upstream—from reactive rescue medicine to proactive, preventive health—creating a system that delivers better outcomes at radically lower cost.
At its core, Doctor AI reframes health as a foundation of economic and civic strength. It presents a comprehensive model for direct access to care that empowers people, strengthens nations, and redefines health as the organizing principle of
Intellectual Stimulation
Nurse Florence, Tell Me About the Occipital Lobe invites young readers on a vivid journey through the eye and brain, transforming complex science into an inspiring adventure of curiosity and understanding. Which scene or explanation in the book is your personal favorite, and why?
I thought illustrator YunTse Lee did an outstanding job drawing the neuronal synapse for the 7th drawing in the book. The amazing work our illustrators do really helps me bring the science to life and makes this a fun series.
How did you balance the use of advanced scientific vocabulary with the need to keep the story accessible and engaging for children?
Intellectual stimulation is something I try to live by. It’s a core characteristic of transformational leadership, which is what our civilization needs. Believing that others are smart and capable of learning complex things is important for our growth as a society, so I’m just doing this leadership trait with kids.
Can you share your collaboration process with illustrator YunTse Lee, especially how you approached visualizing the occipital and temporal lobes for kids?
We give our illustrators very vague drawing requests to inspire them to use maximum creativity to produce colorful, intricate, and amazing drawings.
What impact do you hope this book will have on children who may later pursue STEM fields or careers in health and science?
I hope that a global movement for health literacy is sparked so that all societies are comfortable talking with their doctor about their medical issues.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
Sometimes it seems only a nurse can bring technical information down to an understanding that an ordinary person can grasp. The Nurse Florence® book series provides high quality medical information that even a child can grasp. By introducing young kids to correct terminology and science concepts at an early age, we can help increase our children’s health literacy level as well as help to prepare them for courses and jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. We need more scientists so I hope that many children will enjoy this book series and consider a job involving science. Introducing Some Medical Words to Kids in Every Book® A Movement of Global Health Promotion and Literacy Dow Creative Enterprises® Help Civilization Reach Its Potential®
Family Books
Nurse Florence®, Tell Me About the Bladder follows three friends having lunch with the school nurse, who teaches them about the bladder’s function and how to identify when there may be a problem they should see a doctor about. How did you decide what information to include in this book?
We plan to publish around 700 Nurse Florence® books to be able to cover all the interesting things about the body and diseases. Discussing the bladder was just another topic to cross off our list.
Most of the Nurse Florence stories start off with Jean, Sonia, and Condi having a question. Where did the idea for these three friends come from, and have they changed at all through the series?
It was just spontaneous creativity to pick 3 girls to interact with the school nurse. To promote diversity, we picked a Caucasian (Jean), Hispanic (Sonia), and African American (Condi). The girls have similar characteristics in each book, but their appearance changes according to each illustrator’s artistic point of view. Kids look forward to not just learning about science, but also enjoy the excitement of seeing another illustrator’s idea of what the Nurse Florence® universe should look like.
I love the way you explain anatomy in this series, making it accessible to younger readers. How do you balance keeping the material scientifically / medically accurate while still appealing to a younger audience?
I simply trust that kids can learn complex things as long as they are taught carefully and thoughtfully. Kids are smart!
What is one thing that people point out after reading your books that surprises you?
What surprised me the most at the beginning of the Nurse Florence® journey was that even grandparents are saying they are learning things with each book. These are family books, and that makes me happy.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence | LinkedIn | Amazon
Sometimes it seems only a nurse can bring technical information down to an understanding that an ordinary person can grasp. The Nurse Florence(R) book series provides high quality medical information that even a child can grasp. By introducing young kids to correct terminology and science concepts at an early age, we can help increase our children’s health literacy level as well as help to prepare them for courses and jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. We need more scientists so I hope that many children will enjoy this book series and consider a job involving science. Introducing Some Medical Words to Kids in Every Book(R) A Movement of Global Health Promotion and Literacy Dow Creative Enterprises(R) Help Civilization Reach Its Potential(R)
