I was born in New Jersey circa 1951 and raised in southern California. A typical suburban upbringing: my electrical engineer dad, my housewife mom, one little brother, neighborhood friends and activities, family summer vacations, Brownies and Girl Scouts, parents divorced when I was 12.

I was plagued from adolescence with painful cold sores several times a year. Worse than the physical pain was the utter embarrassment I would go through for two weeks until the unsightly mouth sore healed.

In the early 1990’s, I had been working in a non-clinical department of a major teaching medical center in Los Angeles. At that time, medical centers and hospitals across the United States were going through difficult times due to major Medicare reimbursement changes for hospital services. There were massive hospital layoffs, and while employees were concerned about their jobs, they acquired additional responsibilities due to those who had been layed off.

Like everyone else, I was on pins and needles, but I had additional worries. A long time relationship ended, and one of my dearest friends, Peter West, was terminally ill. I was the one there to help him through it all. The extraordinary stress was triggering more cold sore infections than usual. On a couple of occasions, with a fever and flu-like symptoms, I called in sick. By the end of the day, all flu symptoms were gone and replaced with the painful, swollen lower lip characteristic of a cold sore.

I was concerned that the stress would continue to cause similar infections, necessitating having to call in sick, putting my job at further risk.

Inspired to solve the problem, I researched herbs and healing methods that might shorten cold sore infections. There was a German clinical study involving certain herbs that held promise in the early treatment of a herpes simplex infection. I purchased the herbs, and at home in my kitchen, created a topical mixture for use the next time I experienced the early warning symptom of another cold sore.

When that day arrived, without optimism, I applied a small amount of the herbal mixture. Typically, the eruption would start 20-30 minutes after the early symptom. I waited, and waited. Hours passed, and no eruption. Did I rejoice? No. I couldn’t absorb that I invented a preventative, and concluded what I thought to be an early cold sore symptom was something else, a fleeting, meaningless sensation. Yet, each subsequent episode produced the same result.

Over time, I realized the remedy was also helpful even if a cold sore had already started to erupt, if it was recent. On a couple of occasions, I neglected to apply it in time. I applied my home-made remedy several times a day and found it reduced the severity and the duration to 4-7 days instead of two weeks. Good, but nothing’s better than prevention.

In 1994, at 43, and after 14 years at the medical center,I was layed off and devastated. The medical center is where I ‘grew up’, acquired confidence, established many friendships. It was the comfortable, familiar place from where I was going to retire. This was a terrible blow, because I was already raw from Peter’s passing three weeks earlier in our emergency room.

Peter had left for me a moderate sum of money, and I also received severance from the medical center. I made the decision to use the money to seed marketing efforts to bring my herbal home remedy to the natural food industry.

With no experience or knowledge about manufacturing or starting a business, certain events came together to start things rolling. A couple of weeks after leaving the medical center, I was at home working at my desk.

The phone rang. A woman was on the line who dialed the wrong number, but for some inexplicable reason, we started to chat. When does that happen? She was a member of a trade organization of small business owners in the cosmetics industry. We spoke for 45 minutes when she invited me to be her guest at that night's meeting taking place a short distance from my home. At first reluctant, I did accept.

There I met suppliers I would need for labels, product displays, bottles and containers, and graphic artists. There was the owner of a contract lab in southern California who accepted small minimum orders, important for a start-up, with whom I still work with today. The lab's product development staff maintained the ingredients for my "recipe”, improved the taste, and assured compliance with the FDA monograph for over-the-counter cold sore products. I was on my way!

I still had to decide upon a product name that would also honor and memorialize Peter. He had a genius IQ, was brilliantly funny, and highly creative.

His advice was somehow always correct and reliable, loved summer time and baseball games. He held a deep belief in self-responsibility, was patriotic, ingenious, magical, and as he deemed fit, giving. One year for my birthday, he gave me a book entitled “Attracting Wealth”. Upon opening it, I found a $100 bill tucked in at the beginning of each chapter. There was no limit in his ability to be creative and do things in a meaningful way.

He was quite the extraordinary fellow, an opinion we both shared. At one time, he printed business cards that simply read “Peter West, Extraordinaire.”

Peter collected pewter wizards because they symbolized his uncanny way of making things happen, sometimes as if by magic. And there it was, a product icon to memorialize Peter – a little wizard with a magic wand. Soon after, at a small dinner party, a friend jokingly threw out a name 'Cold Sores Begone!”, and it clicked. My product now had a name, and it was perfect.

When the first commercially produced product was available, I took it to a few neighborhood health food stores, who agreed to try it on consignment. Nervous that no one would buy, I drove to each of these stores daily for weeks, counting how many bottles remained, and after a moderate amount of time, all bottles had sold. It was a huge day when the largest of those health food stores, Erewhon Natural Foods Market in Los Angeles, made a permanent shelf tag for the item and changed the terms from consignment to Net 30 days.

Eventually, I recognized the need to have Cold Sores Begone™ available through a trade distributor that serves the natural products industry. Most health food stores prefer to purchase from a distributor rather than the manufacturer. Through a distributor, stores receive quantity discounts, the ability to place orders electronically, and minimize the number of suppliers they must pay directly.

I made a presentation by mail to a major health food distributor on the east coast, and after subsequent follow up calls and letters over the following year, there was no response. As the buyer told me later, one day, she felt a cold sore coming on. She remembered the sample I had sent, now collecting dust on the top of her file cabinet. She applied it, and was so excited that it prevented the eruption, she approved Cold Sores Begone™ on the spot, and placed an order immediately. With this particular distributor now a customer, it opened doors, and became easier to obtain product approval from other major distributors throughout the country.

Store buyers started mentioning that customers were asking for a canker sore remedy for the painful ulceration on the tongue or elsewhere inside the mouth that make eating, drinking, and talking difficult. I was also a canker sore sufferer, and had noticed a pattern that when I developed one, there had been stress, fatigue, or the pain and irritation of a dental procedure.

When I began to learn that many canker sore sufferers experienced the same triggers prior to an outbreak, I had an idea what to do for a new formulation, and went to work. In 2001, Canker Sores Begone™ was launched. The remedy contained herbs well known for their antibacterial and antiviral properties.

I began to receive phone calls and email from an unexpected population – those undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. They were reporting it was the only product or prescription drug that relieved the pain and heal the sore. Of those reports, the length of time for pain relief with each application varied, but all said it worked like nothing else. Like most people, my life has been touched more than once by cancer affecting someone close and acutely sensitive to cancer related pain having endured it through them. Something that I created is helping someone experiencing pain.

In 2003, the alternative health editor at PREVENTION Magazine, a cold sore sufferer, prevented an outbreak using Cold Sores Begone™. She contacted me to advise she was writing an article about her experience in an upcoming issue. This website was initially created to provide their readers with information, and the ability to order online or by phone. This was a major event for my company and because of it, other health related magazines tested one or both remedies, and published rave reviews.

Today, still a small company, and without the advertising budget of the bigger guys, Cold Sores Begone™ and Canker Sores Begone™ has now sold in the hundreds of thousands due to word of mouth, website exposure, store placement, and magazine product articles and reviews.

I become overwhelmed with gratitude when I hear from customers that Cold Sores Begone™ or Canker Sores Begone™ has been “a life saver” or improved the quality of their lives. If I should accomplish nothing else in this life, I’m happy.

Peter and Robin,1984