Back in 2011, I wrote a Health Tip entitled, “Physicians as Morons”, whose title over the years I have come to regret, the unpleasantness of name-calling and all. You can read about this case here, but it’s just easier if I summarize it. A young woman had contacted me for help with the unusual diagnosis […]
Category: Featured
The Loneliest, Saddest Patients In America
Imagine this: one night, you awaken from sleep feeling itchy all over. You scratch and scratch, eventually getting back to sleep. The next day, you feel like your skin is crawling. Your hair just doesn’t feel like your hair. A few days later, you see skin lesions on different parts of your body. You go […]
Commonly Missed Diagnosis: The Three Faces of Lyme Disease
It’s midsummer and the tick population is exploding. They can latch onto your ankles and fall into your hair and when they bite (which you won’t even feel), they’ll attach themselves and empty their gastrointestinal tract into your bloodstream. Ticks are a cesspool with legs and this story can end with Lyme disease. The total number of Lyme disease cases, caused by the organism Borrelia burgdorferi, is definitely on […]
Wholehealth Chicago Partners With Chicago’s Finest Trigger Point Therapy Team
Let me tell you about Mary Biancalana and the value of myofascial trigger point therapy. A lifelong fitness expert and personal trainer, in her early thirties Mary found herself with chronic headaches. First, she was told they were ‘psychological,’ then a manifestation of a little understood term called “trigger points” and another condition she’d never […]
LONGEVITY MEDICINE: Chronic Inflammation and Cytokines
Did you ever wonder why some obese people, after decades of being badgered by their families and physicians to lose weight, out-live all of them and are healthy for decades? Or how someone of normal weight falls over dead in his fifties from a massive heart attack the week after his check-up which included a […]
Longevity Medicine: Take A Family Inventory
If every one of your parents/grandparents/great-grandparents made it well into their 90’s, and passed away with their bodies and minds basically intact, you can probably skip this Health Tip. Something like, “Dad was 94 and had finished chopping logs. Sat on a stump, closed his eyes and just died.” Or, “Meemaw (Grandmom was clearly from […]
Longevity Medicine: Your Gums And Your Lifespan
Last week, we chatted about how your microbiome affects your longevity. Now let’s meander to the other end of your 30-foot-long alimentary canal, up to your mouth, specifically your gums. WholeHealth Chicago patients know we do a check on the health status of their mouths during the physical exam, asking about their dental visits or […]
Longevity Medicine: How Owning A Gun Might Shorten Your Life
My personal experience with guns is close to zero, except for coveting (and never receiving) a Daisy Red Ryder air rifle when I was about twelve years old. Otherwise, I’ve never held, much less shot, either a rifle or a handgun, nor have I ever been in a situation where I might have muttered, “If […]
The Roe Vs Wade Debacle And My Decades Dealing With Abortion
The opinions on abortion are mine and not necessarily those of the staff at WholeHealth Chicago. For Health Tip readers who have commented that I should not voice political opinions and stick to my work as a doctor, I suggest you glance at any of the websites aimed at physicians themselves. Fully one third of the […]
Longevity Medicine: How Much Exercise Really Makes A Difference?
People being people, they are always on the lookout for the easiest route to anything fun and worthwhile and most would rather add years to their lives by doing something simple, like taking nutritional supplements. Add healthful eating, reducing alcohol, stopping tobacco altogether, and the road to longevity gets more challenging. Start recommending regular exercise […]
Longevity Medicine: First, Know Your Telomeres!
Most people figure they must be getting older based on how they feel and look. We wince at our first grey hair, deepening wrinkles, and shifting body fat. We huff and puff climbing the stairs, forget names, and occasionally leak fluids. We relate to the line from a Leonard Cohen song, “I ache in the […]
Longevity Medicine: How We Age
Gerontology is the scientific study of aging. It’s a relatively new field, pretty well dominated by research PhDs. Certainly it’s a science that was virtually nonexistent when I was in medical school, back when preventive medicine itself got little more than lip service. With the recent arrival of anti-aging medicine/longevity medicine, MDs started paying more […]
Longevity Medicine: The Earlier You Start, The Longer You’ll Live
Leading an orchestra in Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is a real workout for any conductor. Tall and straight-backed, the very elegant Swedish Maestro Herbert Blomstedt stepped to the podium and led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the 66-minute piece. From memory, no score in front of him. He would repeat this performance for two more […]
Finally! Whole Health Chicago To Open A South Side Office
OK, OK, so it took 20 years, but it will be worth the wait. WholeHealth Chicago’s new location is in the Beverly neighborhood, at 3237 W, 111th Street. The location is actually in Mount Greenwood, but no one except those who live there knows where Mount Greenwood is. (There is also to my knowledge no […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 16: A Hidden Cancer
Yes, cancer is a scary topic. Most primary care doctors, this one at least, know that when a patient comes in for evaluation of a symptom she can’t figure out, a symptom that isn’t going away (like chronic fatigue), a symptom for which she’s been told, “We can’t find anything wrong with you,” at least […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 15: Long Covid
Doctors who work with patients who have chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme, and fibromyalgia have remarked on the similarity between people with these conditions and those suffering the frequently disabling symptoms of long Covid. Like chronic Lyme, in which many patients don’t remember either a tick bite or Lyme disease, patients with all the features of […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 14: Sugar (Yep, Sugar)
Picture a bowl filled with granulated sugar and a can of Coke next to it. How many rounded teaspoonfuls of sugar do you need to scoop from that bowl to equal the sugar in your Coke? Five? Ten? It’s 16. Yes, 16 teaspoonfuls of sugar in a single can. But, you think to yourself, I […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 13: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
Most often, even before patients realize they’ve developed multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), its very first manifestation is fatigue, the sense of feeling deeply tired all the time. MCS is yet another condition I learned nothing about during my internal medicine residency, and when I asked the then-chief of allergy at Northwestern about it, he dismissed […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 12: Candida (Yeast) Overgrowth
Back in 1993, several weeks before the opening of what would come to be called WholeHealth Chicago, I was summoned to the office of the chief of medicine at the hospital where I was a staff member. The chief had heard rumors I was opening a center that would combine conventional and alternative practitioners. Seeing […]
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 11: Your Sluggish Liver
Spread your left hand across your upper abdomen. Beneath it lies your liver, the largest organ in your body. Liver metabolism is so complex that the late medical essayist Lewis Thomas, MD, wrote “Nothing would save me and my liver if I were in charge…for I am considerably less intelligent than my liver.” And yet […]