 So, as Ashkan said, I'm the fourth president of Iris to be speaking, but actually I'm the first president of Iris. I was the founding president way back in the Dark Ages, although for rest I guess Dark Ages is a good thing. So I think the function of people of my vintage at this conference is to tell you about all the wonderful things we did back then and to exhort you to do better than you're doing. Last year I did a review of the development of rest research from its beginnings in the early 1950s up to 2012, and this year I was thinking about doing an update, but as I looked around the literature there wasn't enough in terms of rest research to update. So in a way what I'm going to do is to do some exhortation, but also to maybe make some suggestions about where rest researchers and tank operators may be going from here. Alternative complementary and integrative medicine, or as psychologists prefer to call it, behavioral health is an offshoot of a whole variety of roots including eastern meditation practices, religious spiritual practices as well as western ones, with if you look at complementary medicine and integrative medicine also serious input from traditional western medicine. So I think that the things that we do with rest and combining it with other methodologies should not ignore the importance of incorporating western medical practice, western medical methodology, western medical equipment and so forth in our integrated activities. But we should also include these other things that some of which are listed on the slide although certainly not all of them by any means. But I think and you have to accept the fact that I think these things because I am trained as a researcher, I'm not a clinician, I don't treat patients, I never have, but I always say what I would like to see combined with rest is methods and materials and practices that have been tested in scientific ways that is with control groups, with sufficient sample size, with statistical analysis of the results, and with looking at things like statistical significance or power to make sure that anecdotes don't get accepted as gospel truth without some objectively evaluated evidence to back them up. And I think one of the problems that we have faced is that there has been a lot of violation of that principle. Now what I want to talk about briefly and this is going to be a short talk is the fact that alternative integrative and complementary medicine are not anymore just fringe activities. They are in fact into the mainstream as is recognized by the fact that the National Institutes of Health in the United States and other equivalent or counterpart organizations in other countries recognize that these practices have something to contribute beyond the usual medical practice and that in fact they can accomplish things either alone or in combination with more traditional approaches that are very useful in maintaining health and restoring health. And as the slide shows, according to NIH, almost 40% of Americans use this kind of approach as well as normal Western medicine. Now I'm not proposing that rest should substitute for medicine. I think that it's very important for example to make sure that people who come for various kinds of problems that they are suffering and that they hope will be relieved by rest that they have an examination to make sure that it's not something physiological that is not subject to kind of behavioral approaches or alternative approaches but that need to be treated by surgery or by medication. And I think Tom referred yesterday to a patient that got pain relief from floating and it turned out that the patient had cancer. It's important when you have somebody like that who comes to you for help with something like pain to make sure that there isn't some underlying cause that is not going to be treated by rest or certainly not by rest alone. But anyway, it's also important that once that's established that then you go on and do whatever you need to do or whatever you can do using rest and other complementary or alternative medicine. So this is NCAM, which is the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. NIH has its own center for this kind of work and as you see they recognize and some people think that NIH and other government agencies are totally hidebound and conservative if not reactionary and they will not look at these alternative methods with an open mind. Well, it's open enough that they in their mission statement they recognize that all of these things do have something to contribute and that methods that were once considered complementary or alternative are moving into the mainstream. And I think moving into the mainstream is especially appropriate for flotation rest. So they recognize the trend, okay, integrative trend is growing among providers and health care systems and it talks about why that is the case, but at the bottom in red, the red is my addition, they don't have it that way on their website, scientific evidence is limited in many instances and there are not much in the way of reliable data. So people find it difficult to make decisions about what to use, what methodology to go for. And I think that's something that we need to take account of. I think one of the problems with the spread of flotation rest, which by the way, of course I'm very happy to see, is that we have not established for what it doesn't work. And I think that's one of the major research priorities that people in the field will have to take on. That is, if it works for everything, then people will just look at it and say, well, it's a panacea, it's probably a placebo because nothing except placebo's works for almost everything and so I think we need to recognize rest as a treatment modality has its limits and we don't know what they are. So that's an area that's worth investigation. So CCAM is interested in doing that, trying to find out more about the effects and the safety and how they interact with other things. And so, guess what? They fund research on this and this is really the core aspect of my talk today. If you look at the list of things that they fund research on, you will note that many of them are things that have been addressed by rest researchers and practitioners who have found beneficial effects. In relief, relaxation, muscle joint and movement therapy and so on and so forth. Almost all of these have been the subject of both research and practice with flotation rest and or with chamber rest with positive results. So what's the problem? The problem is that we don't have the research data that would make it persuasive to people who are skeptical about rest to begin with. Much of this is anecdotal self-report, pilot studies, case studies and so on. And you go to a medical scientist and you say, look, we've got three subjects who floated and they had this positive effect and most medical scientists and most psychologists will say, yeah, that's very nice but three subjects doesn't prove anything. So give us a reasonable sample size, give us a control treatment, control group and do the statistics and then maybe we'll believe you. And I think that's one of the things that's really lacking in our field. Now if you think this is trivia, take a look at how the budget of CCAM has grown over the years. More than doubled, $128 million last year, last fiscal year. I don't know what it's going to be this fiscal year but $128 million could fund a fair amount of good rest research, right, you know, $128 million here, $128 million there, pretty soon you're talking real money. Now has anybody here ever applied for funds from this source? Now, okay, well, why aren't we, right, I mean rest I think is an epitome, a prototype of integrative or complementary and maybe alternative medicine. Why aren't we tapping into this money? Well if you look at what kind of complementary health approaches people are using, you will see that most of the weight of it is on natural products, quote, unquote, okay. And there is really nothing there that's specifically pointed at anything like flotation rest. There isn't. The fact that there isn't means that there's room for it. And that means that if people get busy and start applying for this money and looking at the literature and backing up their proposals with some evidence, obviously not total evidence because if you knew if you had the total evidence you wouldn't need anymore research money. But showing what might be promising and worth exploring, CCAM might be able to give you some funding. Body of Behavioral Medicine, of which some of you may know, also emphasizes multidisciplinarity, integration and looking at prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation. And I would add health enhancement, making it better than it was, not just bringing you back to health, but making you healthier. So again, it's very compatible with the things that the tank industry and the tank culture is conducting. So this is my suggested definition of Integrative Behavioral Health, Development and Integration of Behavioral and Psychosocial Science, Knowledge and Techniques, et cetera, for physical and mental health maintenance, restoration and promotion. And I think that would describe to people outside the float community what it is that we are doing, what it is that we can do, and what it is that they should be respecting. Rest is not on the NCAM list of methods to be investigated, but it should be. If you look at its webpage, health topics A to Z, excuse me, Z, sorry about that, it should be, right? And certainly they have a specific category of relaxation techniques, and we're not in that. And if there's anything that we know for sure where there's been a lot of research, it's that flotation rest enhances the ability to relax. I isn't it in there, because nobody told them and we have to tell them, you know, the government doesn't know anything except what you tell them, sometimes not even that. There's no U.S. government website, at least I couldn't find one that says anything about rest. So what do we do? Well, what we do is we draw to their attention the fact that here is a technique that has a lot to offer this general area. One of the nicest things, for example, and one that we often make a point of is that if somebody has a bad reaction to rest, that is, they find it unpleasant or upsetting or whatever, unlike medication, you can stop the bad side effects immediately. Come out of the tank, take a shower, get dressed, and off you go. And very, very, very few people have bad reactions that last longer than that. Most of the time, if you get a negative reaction, as soon as they come out and get showered and dressed, they're okay. With medication, you know, you take the pill, you have a bad side effect. You just have to tough it out until the power of the pill is used up, unless you get an antidote. You have to go to the doctor to get an antidote. So it's a safe procedure, safer than most in traditional medicine, and also safer than some in other kinds of the alternative and complementary medical approaches. People sometimes get hurt in various kinds of manipulation and so on. But NCAM says, in many instances, a lack of reliable data makes it difficult to make informed decisions, as I showed before. You know, it's up to us to provide the reliable data. They're not going to do it. They don't know about us. The one problem here is that, as the blue print shows, NCAM funds research. They do not fund straight clinical applications. So if you put in a proposal just to use flotation to treat something or other, unless there's a research component, you're not going to get money. And therefore, my advice is, here's the exhortation part. Research need to team up with tank operators, and vice versa, and do joint projects such as the fibromyalgia study, which could be a model. And it doesn't have to be the only model. People can look at other problems that they might attack through the use of rest, maybe combined with something else, maybe not. Use the tank operators, use the researchers, have them working together, and not only expand the scope of rest as a treatment and as a research method, but also bring it more to the attention of a government funding agency and buy that to the public. So we could advance both, both the research and the applications, so both the commercial floating community and the research community could benefit from this. You have to go after the money. Research takes money, and that would also help to fund some of the facilities, and so find each other, team up, and get going. And I think a conference like this is a wonderful place to find each other and team up. Now get going. Thank you.