For the better part of 45 or so years, I’ve always known where my life would lead; ever since my dad hoisted me up onto that little, black, padded seat on Stage 4 at CBS studios and said, “Now look through the viewfinder”, Gilligan’s Island’s never seemed the same to me. After that, the entertainment industry or more precisely, the art of storytelling became my life and I can’t remember a day when I didn’t have a camera in one hand and, thanks to my father again about a year later, something equally important in the other; a pair of horse reins. You see, Wild Wild West had just started shooting and my dad was splitting his time between that and Gunsmoke being shot on a movie ranch that still exists to this day just north of Los Angeles in a town called Saugus. So, between Robert Conrad and James Arness a whole host of hard-workin’ and little-remembered wranglers that handled and took care of the horses both on and off the set, I guess you could say I was a pretty lucky kid. The two things that would be my life for the rest of my life have been with me my whole life; my camera and my horse.

So what’s all this have to do with starting a Blog called Healthy Horseman anyway? Well, everything. You see, accidents happen, especially in the world of horses and hard work and when they do, lives change. I know. It happened to me. You see, for more than 40 years, neither my wife who grew up around horses like I did or I had been involved in any really hard, balled-up, train wrecks. Oh, I'm not sayin' rodeo, ropin' and cowboy mounted shooting hasn't introduced both of us to the arena floor more times than either of us care to recall but we've always been able to walk, or sometimes hobble, away in one piece. That is until just under a year ago when that run-a-luck ended, for me at least, when a green-broke colt named "Rowdy" put me chaps-first into the dirt fracturing my pelvis and reducing 4 of my already degenerating spinal disks in my lower back to mash.

Today, because of extraordinary doctors and the fact that I’m blessed to have both the financial means through insurance and the physical access to them and their expertise, I’m walking again which, believe me, laying there in the dirt after I went down not able to move my legs seemed almost impossible. I’m riding and working and living my life far better off for the experience not only physically but mentally as well. But in the intervening months, two things became painfully obvious. First was the fact that the accident I had is all-too-common in areas of the nation where a person’s financial standing or physical location precludes them from accessing truly world-class doctors and two, even with the advent of the Internet, access to accurate, unbiased information relative to medical devices, operations and general health measures is almost non-existent.

Did you know that more than 200 million Americans suffer from chronic back pain every day making its treatment alone a $6 Billion dollar-a-year industry and that less than 1% of us will ever have corrective surgery like I had to have? And where do you think the vast majority of the information comes from on the Internet relative to back health? That’s right. It comes from people who have a vested interest in selling their products and not the patient’s well-being and THAT is the reason for the Horseman’s Heath Blog.

You see, while I don't know a great deal about the world of Blogging, I do know a bit about storytelling and moviemaking. I know that both take a great deal of time to create, produce and maintain. I know they both ask the viewer or the reader to invest their time with the Blog or the television program, something that is increasingly precious and valuable. I also know that, generally speaking, a Blogger like a storyteller should have something of value to contribute to the world; something of a value at least equal to the time a reader or viewer invests in reading the Blog or watching television show. I guess I'm old fashioned that way. It goes back to that old Cowboy belief that's ingrained in each of us who knows the ways of the ranch and the horse; a fair days pay for a fair days work and I know that the vast majority of the Blogs I've started I've stopped well-before the finish because my time was more important than what I was reading so believe me, a great deal of consideration went into my decision to create this Blog. And, in the end, it was the people like those I've read on these pages who convinced me to invest the time and yes money it takes to write these words and fill these spaces with stories and information that, while not specific to the cowboy world, are certainly needed more by people who live their lives without a safety net than those who work from a high-backed, all-leather, brass-tacked, over-stuffed, executive office chair.

So, in the coming weeks, I appreciate the opportunity to give back to a community that’s been so good to me and my whole family, the American Cowboy community, when we needed you. I hope to bring you, both in word here and in video on YouTube, the advice of the Los Angeles and New York-based doctors that let me walk again; advice that’s unbiased, credible and accurate with information you can take to your doctors, wherever in America you are, to try and alleviate your pain through methods and practices that may be new to them. In short, I’ll try and impart as much knowledge and experience and information I can in the hopes that what I went through can somehow help you. In a world where my opportunities to contribute meaningful entertainment is becoming increasingly rare; where network television’s Reality TV somehow reins in the ratings over quality Cable productions like “Last American Cowboy”, where the need for veracity in true News content has somehow fallen victim to the want of the biased editorials of “Citizen Journalism” and Corporate America has gained control of a once, purely academic, reliable and unbiased source of information, the Internet, I appreciate your time. I hope I will serve you well.