Visit from Governor David Paterson

photo credit: http://www.pajamadeen.com/tag/david-paterson

On June 20th, 2013, the PATH Foundation had a visit from our friend and political advisor, Governor David Paterson.  During his tenure as governor, Paterson became New York's first African American governor and the second legally blind governor of any U.S. state.  Our leading researcher, Eric R. Braverman, MD, sat down with Governor Paterson to discuss some of the obstacles that Governor Paterson has overcome throughout his career.  Check out the interview below:

Eric R. Braverman, MD: Governor, tell us a little about what you had to overcome when you lost your vision.

Governor Paterson: Well, I never lost my vision.  I was diagnosed with optic atrophy, which is scar tissue that lies between the retina and the optic nerve.  It presented itself when I was about six or seven months old.  There’s this theory that I got a fever or something and it burned my eye tissues.  They keep writing about this in my bio, but it’s not true.  In terms of conscious memory, my vision has always been about the same.  I was one of the first blind students mainstreamed in the public education at the insistence of my mother.  I went to public school during a time in which most blind students went to special schools.  Inevitably, in that environment, most of them are dependent people.  If my mother had not forced the school system to take me and force my father to move to a neighborhood where the school system was, I don’t think I’d be sitting here.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: When did you start realizing, as we did at PATH Medical, that you had extraordinary memory capacity?

Governor Paterson: I’m not sure but I know there was evidence of it because when I was a kid, I was a sports fan.  I could remember all the names of the players and I could also remember their statistics.  I know my father was shocked and he thought he had a really good memory.  I guess around high school, they really started to notice it.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: When did you first memorize an hour-long speech?

Governor Paterson: I only did it once.  I could speak for an hour, but a lot of people can speak for an hour because they know a lot and there’s material that they will draw on.  However, all of this is done extemporaneously.  In 2009, I had to memorize 63 minutes of the State of the State address.  No one knows of any governor doing that for any longer.  In 1988, Governor Mario Cuomo memorized his State of the State address, but it was 18 minutes.  The interesting thing is, while it’s a great accomplishment, when people look upon it, it’s in a sense a shame that I had to do that.  There’s this anti-Braille literacy wave in this country that has said: “We’re going to take the blind and not really make them look so blind.  We’re not going to have them use Braille anymore; we’re just going to have them listen, so it doesn’t offend us as a society.”  For that reason, my parents never had me learn Braille.  If I knew Braille, I could’ve read the speech like anyone else did.  I took me tremendous amount of time, which was probably shorter for me than other people, to memorize that speech.  But still, the pressure that I was under to make that speech caused me to make mistakes in the appointment of United States Senator.  Those mistakes were the beginning of my downfall as a governor.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: You had the same problem Franklin Roosevelt had, in that no one ever wanted to show him on crutches.  He was never shown with braces on television; he was always shown at a podium.

Governor Paterson: They definitely faked it. He’s given credit now for being a disabled governor, but he never really wanted to be seen.  There was not much television those days, so the public didn’t actually see him that much.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: Even the newspapers never published him “looking” disabled.

Governor Paterson: That was almost an agreement that they had, with the media outlets.

Eric R. Braverman, MD:  Don’t you think it’s fitting though, a paralyzed president saved a paralyzed country by getting it back moving again. In your case, maybe we’re a nation that is blind to the vision of the United States. You are a visionary and a person who can see even if you can’t see what we call in medicine the “small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.”  The small line of things we can see on the electromagnetic spectrum is trivial and turns out actually to be a form of spam, meaning that it interferes with some individuals actually having vision.  In your case, I find you to be a visionary.  Unfortunately, your vision for the future of the state was too difficult for those in present power.

Governor Paterson:  That happens a lot when people get used to having things and they are told that they can’t have them.  I would say, what did surprise me, is that in public service my blindness was something that people marveled at.  People were shocked that I was able to overcome these obstacles.  However, when I was no longer a deputy leader or lieutenant governor and became in charge, I noticed that the publicity shifted to mocking me.  One time I was holding something up and apparently it was upside, which the media kept showing over and over again.  There was a double and triple focus on my blindness. One day in a speech I said “make no mistake, we will build the World Trade Center.”  Well, we had started building already at that time, but my point was that we will have a finished project.  So they wrote an article saying someone should take me down to the World Trade Center and have me touch some of the buildings that are starting to go up.  Another time the Chief of Staff, who is known as the Governor’s Secretary, had to resign.  They wrote in the paper that this normally wouldn’t be a problem but because I’m blind and this Chief of Staff was known to read to me, there’s no one to read to me now.  Well, he was known to read to me in an office with seven people, he never read to me when I was Governor.  I also don’t know if the newspapers were aware of it, but there were 200,000 state employees who know how to read.  It wasn’t like I had any problem getting someone to read to me.  However, that article got written and all of that culminated with the depiction of me by Fred Armisen on Saturday Night Live.  I’ve grown to become a friend of Fred Armisen’s and I can take a joke, but what continually bothered me about that skit was the premise that someone who is blind is stupid or ridiculous or keeps bumping into things.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: You had the unfortunate Jackie Robinson experience.  You broke not just the disability barrier, but the color barrier too.

Governor Paterson: Well I had something that Jackie didn’t, which was that the state police traveled with me, so if I really got tired of someone, then I could get them removed.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: You have the best sense of humor out of any politician.

Governor Paterson:  Somebody once told me that a good ethical decision will eventually be a good political decision.  The problem with public servants is that they don’t want to wait.  They don’t want to live in that space where they are being criticized or cajoled.  When I go back to Albany or even if I walk down the street, you wouldn’t believe how wonderfully many people treat me.  If I stop in the street for any reason, someone comes up to me and says “What’s the matter Governor, where are you going, can I help you?”  I think that I feel the redemption person by person, but whether I felt it or not, if I went back to Albany, I wouldn’t change very much.  I probably wouldn’t have gone to the Yankee game, but I certainly would’ve followed the same policies that I did. 

Eric R. Braverman, MD: You had great policies and I love what you did on obesity.  You took a big interest in obesity and now Governor Cuomo has followed.  You’re the first person to recognize that childhood obesity was the biggest problem in the state and that childhood obesity would kill the future of the state.  Now the first thing that the Health Commissioner did when he was appointed was that he published on the failure of BMI measurements and the need for the institution of leptin blood tests.  Tell us about the love of your alternative medicine; tell us about your mission on getting children healthy and your excitement of making the brain the focus of medicine.

Governor Paterson: I’ve always had an interest in alternative medicine; I don’t even know where it came from.  I used to listen to Dr. Braverman and Gary Knull on WEBD years ago before I met either one of them.  I realized a lot of things that we take for granted like our diet.  What school nutritionists would advocate for were not concluded by research or recommendations by scientists and doctors, but were legislated in 1950’s from government.  In other words, white bread, eggs, white sugar, milk, meat three times a day, things that people would never do, were prescribed to us when I was growing up.  I realized that this is an essential issue that we have to address.  Freedom over medical choices was even a discussion during the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  At this time some people thought that every time someone got sick, you should just quarantine them and keep them away from everybody else.  Yet, some people wanted to try treatments.  Not in the Declaration itself, but in the dicta, they first talked about the freedom of speech but the second freedom they mentioned was the freedom of medical choices. 

Eric R. Braverman, MD: So you weren’t a fan of the OPMC and its desire to shut down alternatives.  You would’ve thought that they learned their lesson after mercury; they decided that the doctors that were doing mercury levels were crazy.  Then ten years later, they send out a letter to every citizen that has a high mercury level.

Governor Paterson: It’s all about making money.  I remember back in the ‘90’s the Food and Drug Administration reviewed whether or not melatonin could be sold.  When the pharmaceutical companies came out with the product Melatonix, then all of a sudden everything was fine because it was a drug and not a natural hormone.  These are the types of things that I did not get a chance to work on in my public service career to the extent that I wanted to.  I was very critical of how AZT and ddC were the original treatments for the HIV virus, and yet, even though they didn’t work, the industries were blocking any other type of research on the subject.  These products didn’t work; they were nothing but preservatives at the time.  It’s just interesting how the public has reacted to it and the public has gone to look for other care.  You can’t call the public quacks because the public is supporting them.  The more information the public gets, the more the public will respond.  In the end, a very good political consultant, Dick Morris, says, “you have to regard the public as geniuses.”  Sometimes when the public hasn’t moved in a direction, it’s because they haven’t heard the right message.  Dr. Martin Luther King’s real genius was not his speaking, but he knew how to move the public.  For instance, Rosa Parks, who is known for refusing to sit on the back of the bus, in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, was the third women who had gotten arrested for that.  King would not take up the cause of the other two women.  The first women who got off the bus punched the police officer, so that wouldn’t be a good person to test case.  The second one was an unwed mother.  King realized, although he didn’t have anything against unwed mothers, the fact that she was unwed would be an issue in the South and he knew the religious blacks wouldn’t get behind her.  But Rosa Parks was a civic minded person who spoke well, was a member of her own NACP, could stand up for herself and wouldn’t get intimidated.  When he saw her not sit in the back of the bus, he knew that was the person to build the movement around.  Those little differences made such a huge difference, which is probably why the Occupy Wall Street movement didn’t work because they decided they were going to treat all the people who had mental disability in the city and the people with the disabilities were the ones causing the problems that Occupy Wall Street people had to pay for.  No matter what you think about their point of view, it was their method that didn’t work. 

Eric R. Braverman, MD: What are your favorite alternative medicines that you use right now?

Governor Paterson: Co-enzyme Q10, vitamin B-12, DHEA, and grape seed extract for cancer prevention.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: Any thoughts on male menopause - does it exist?

Governor Paterson: I think it does.

Eric R. Braverman, MD: You know it’s now called male low-T syndrome. 

Governor Paterson: It’s interesting that there’s an emotional reaction that men go through that no one ever acknowledges.  Whether it’s pregnancy, monthly cycle or menopause, women are always characterized as being overly emotional.  Yet, anyone who has ever watched a hockey game has seen how emotional men can get.