Two themes this week. First, on the very same morning I sent out last week’s Health Tip expressing my dismay at an Annals of Internal Medicine article and editorial advising physicians to discourage patients from using multiple vitamins a new study from Germany showed that vitamin D deficiency was strongly linked to fatal heart attacks […]
Category: B
Angelina Jolie, BRCA Testing, and You
The extremely talented actress and director Angelina Jolie made world news last May when she revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she’d taken the proactive step of having both breasts removed to prevent dying of breast cancer, as her own mother had at age 56. Jolie had learned that she had a specific, […]
A Blood Test That Could Save Your Life
One of the most challenging decisions a primary care physician faces concerns preventing a heart attack in a patient who has risk factors, such as high cholesterol, and iffy symptoms like shoulder pain or shortness of breath. As a doctor, you’re uncertain whether or not you should work on the risk factors or send your […]
JAMA Reports Bribing Your Doc Could Improve Care (You Might Not Want These Details)
Two separate articles appeared this week in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) reporting that financial incentives either to individual physicians or group practices might improve the overall quality of care delivered to patients. I guess it’s human nature, especially viewed through the eyes of a lifetime Chicagoan like myself, to think, “Well […]
What’s Your Risk? Breast Cancer in the News Again
I was pleasantly surprised to learn how much damage occurred at the Susan G. Komen Foundation in response to its astonishingly wrong-headed decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Women (and smart men) around the country were rightly outraged that money earmarked for the breast cancer screening of low-income women–not for family planning or […]
Belly Health, Rosacea, and A Starring Role for Mites
You might want to wash your hands before reading this. Start by placing your fingertip to your cheek. Go ahead, really. Now slowly move it toward your lips and into your mouth, paying attention to the uninterrupted inward turn of skin as it changes from cheek to lip to mucous membrane. You probably never thought […]
Qigong for Women’s Breast Health
True prevention for breast health is an active, life-enhancing process. From the Chinese medicine perspective, maintaining a strong internal energy system is the key to true prevention. Life force or the intelligent energy that powers your body’s physical organ systems must flow smoothly throughout the body and the organ systems have to work together harmoniously. […]
Behavior Modification for Doctors: How Insurance Companies Do It
Posted 05/06/2012 You don’t see those billboards anymore, the ones advertising health insurance companies (HICs) with some form of this message: We don’t tell your physician how to practice medicine—we let your doctor take care of you. I guess it was too cynical even for the HICs, an industry in much disfavor these days. Even […]
For Better Brain + Memory, Remember This
When our patients make a wish list of what they’d like most for their health, maintaining an active, creative, and well-functioning brain always scores near the top. By the time we hit our 30s, we accept that we may not be the smartest people on the planet. There will always be someone else who grasps […]
Bowen Technique
What Is It? An extremely gentle form of bodywork, the Bowen Technique was developed in Geelong, Australia, soon after World War II by Tom Bowen (1916-1982), a self-taught masseur. Over the course of many years, Bowen developed a precise sequence of delicate moves across muscles, tendons, and connective tissues, which are performed with great precision […]
A Bubble About To Burst
Posted 10/03/2011 In ancient literature, the Romans went to the ageless Cumaean Sybil for prophetic advice and apparently she had a good track record. My friends consider me the antithesis of the Cumaean Sybil. My stock predictions doom a company. Oscar-wise, Ebert beats me to a pulp every year, and sporting events and elections fare […]
More Sleaze from Big Pharma
I can appreciate you might be fatigued with this topic, but let’s face it: for virtually everyone, health care today means going to the doctor and coming home with a prescription.
Belly Fat! New Research Reveals…
Between the print and TV ads and the pop-ups scuttling like mice from the four borders of your computer screen, belly fat seems to have surpassed global warming as our next great anxiety.
It’s clear these ads are aimed at women, some of whom fall for the hucksterism of what is for many little more than an annoying physiologic change occurring during a perfect storm of dietary indiscretion, genetic predisposition, and stress. As one patient laconically remarked, “My divorce from hell took a solid year. I finally got rid of him, but in the process…” (patting her tummy with both hands) “I got myself…this!”
Europe Bamboozled by Big Pharma, Part 2
Last week we talked about the new European Union laws banning hundreds of herbal remedies. Since a favorite saying of many Europeans is “The problem with you Americans is…” I feel no compunction giving you my opinions about the entire continent getting itself so thoroughly blindsided by corporate-political footsies.
Europe Bamboozled By Big Pharma
Stories like the one I’m going to tell you this week and next make me proud to be a Chicagoan. Nobel prize winning Chicago author Saul Bellow said that we reside in the “contempt center of the USA” and, you know, I’ve got to agree. We take to such chicanery as well-placed bribes, cronyism, no-bid contracts, and politicians hay-tumbling with big corporations as naturally as naive folk worldwide take to breathing.
Biography as Biology
I’d first come across this phrase during a lecture by psychologist and medical intuitive Carolyn Myss, PhD, at a meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association and later reading some of her books, especially Why People Don’t Heal. In it she explores the common problem of people with chronic symptoms and negative test results, delving into how these symptoms develop and what might be done to help them.
Hormones and Breast Cancer
By noon on the day the story hit the news, I’d received a dozen emails from (sensibly) concerned patients asking what the study meant for them. First appearing in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) and then picked up by the wire services and spread around the world, the article addressed phase two of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Study that was originally published in 2002.
You! Off Your Duff and On Your Bike!
Yes, I mean you. You were the one complaining about your weight, right? Yeah, I thought it was you.
Bedbugs! (and a PS on Ticks)
I could sense anxiety in her e mail: These…things…on my skin. I don’t know what they are. Red itchy blistery things. They just appeared. Because they’re all in a line up my leg, a friend said she thought it might be shingles and to contact you.
Hypnotized by Big Pharma
Virtually every day, a fax arrives asking me to participate in one market research study or another on some medical issue related to Big Pharma. If I happen to be interested, I call a phone number, am asked a few questions to determine if I qualify (they especially like primary care doctors), and am scheduled for an appointment. Sometimes I arrive and there’s a group of doctors, sometimes it’s a one-on-one.