Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking in a Few Hours. Really?

I hate speaking in public. Like most oratory-phobes my throat closes up, “Umm” suddenly becomes the single most important word in my vocabulary, and trying to imagine the crowd in its underwear, as the age-old trick has it, complicates matters by several orders of magnitude. So it was with great interest that I read a press release this morning claiming that a new method can totally eliminate the anxiety of speaking in public within a few hours. I’ll have to give the guy a call to learn more. In the meantime, any good stories of people getting over their fear of public speaking? How did you do it?