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POLYCYSTIC OVARY SYNDROME (PCOS): NEW HOPE ON THE HORIZON!

A recent report revealed that there are so many cases of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in the US that costs for diagnosis and lifetime treatments are estimated to be $8 billion a year. If you have PCOS, obviously you’re not alone. It’s estimated that PCOS affects one woman in seven (estimates go as high as […]

THE REAL REASON YOU KEEP GAINING WEIGHT

There was an astonishing experiment described in “UltraProcessed People”, by Chris van Tulleken. It had been conducted in Brazil where they’re light years ahead of us in terms of food safety. They took a number of volunteers, and divided them into two equal groups, A and B. For two months, each group was allowed anything […]

Hydration and Longevity

Sometime in her eighties, my Aunt Hildy, who passed on at 94 or so, handed me a book, “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water”, by an Iranian physician with a totally unpronounceable name, Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. She told me it had changed her life. Dr. B. attributed virtually all chronic illnesses, premature death, and susceptibility to infections to the state of chronic dehydration we had allowed ourselves to endure by our insufficient intake of water.

Because Dr. B. also felt that water had curative properties, his work was literally shredded by conventional physicians here in the U.S., where he was regarded as a “crank” and a “quack”. The Wikipedia entry is especially brutal since it’s written by Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, which (if you bother to read it) seems to have a special loathing for Dr. B. because of his claims that good hydration promotes longevity.

And so the years pass. Dr. B. dies at 74, although his books (he wrote seven more) all remain in print, apparently being read by the well-hydrated, healthy, and generally ignored by the desiccated conventional physicians.

How To Take Care Of Your Gut

I must admit being intrigued by a New York Times article earlier this month entitled, “How a Gastroenterologist Cares for Her Gut”, because, let’s face it, we do a lot of “gut rehab” work here at WholeHealth Chicago. I was curious about the conventional recommendations. In fact, all of us pretty much agree with the […]

Alternative Approaches For Your Depression, Anxiety, Insomnia, And Even A.D.D.

Maybe the increases in these diagnoses began with the COVID pandemic but more likely we just weren’t paying attention. We’ll not really know until a few years from now when statisticians look over the data, compare notes with each other, and can finally say, “Wow! Look at these numbers! More mood disorders, more anti-depressants and […]

This Health Tip Might Make You Anxious: Keep Reading

I scan all sorts of medical information sources to write these Health Tips. The usual ones that every doctor should be reading (JAMA, Medscape, etc.), but I don’t miss the New York Times and the Washington Post. I often find something I might have missed elsewhere. This article from the Times startled me, but it […]

High Dose Ozone Therapy: What It Is And How Doctors Use It

If you’ve been to either of our centers, I’m sure you’ve seen patients relaxing in large recliner chairs, dozing, or busy on their smartphone, tablet or reading a book and on the receiving end of an intravenous drip. If you happen to glance at what’s in the intravenous tubing, you might notice it’s red, and […]

Not One Nibble More Than 25 Grams Of Sugar A Day

Of course, everyone reading this already knows that sugar is “bad” for you. It’ll make you fat, you can get addicted to it, and it causes all sorts of health problems, like early heart disease, diabetes, depression, cancer susceptibility. But recently, a massive study out of China was able to determine how much sugar taken […]

How Menopause Can Destroy Mental Health

“Pretty dramatic title,” I thought, “especially for usually staid, Guardian newspaper.” But the writer had been collecting data from UK doctors, interviewing patients, and clearly was shocked at what she had found. Not only were individual women describing their personal experiences with serious bouts of depression, anxiety, panic attacks and suicidal thoughts, but also “brain […]

Water and Your Longevity

You’ll like this story. Sometime in her eighties, my Aunt Hildy, who passed on at 94 or so, handed me a book, “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water”, by an Iranian physician with a totally unpronounceable name, Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. She told me it had changed her life. Dr. B. attributed virtually all chronic illnesses, […]

You Know It’s Time To Change Doctors When…

Despite waiting weeks for an appointment and filling out all those forms, you can tell from the get-go, you’re being regarded as an inconvenience. Maybe, despite your persistent symptoms, you “look” too healthy to have anything seriously wrong with you and your new doctor has scheduled you for a cursory history/physical/basic blood work before she […]

Longevity Medicine: Three New Facts And Five Anti-Aging Supplements

Scientists completely agree coffee drinking helps longevity. During these days of generally bad news (people getting shot, the Monarch butterfly population in steep decline) it is heartening to read the findings from a huge study (over 170,000 men and women with average age 55 tracked over seven years) whose “all cause death rate” was dramatically […]

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: 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: 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 […]

Anti-Aging Therapies: Carl Bogaard, Hormones, and Peptides

Before I get into today’s details about longevity medicine–lab tests, hormones, peptides, and the like—let’s pause and reflect on Carl Bogaard, who died August 7 at age 103. Mr. Bogaard was famous as a fitness buff, doing dozens of pushups daily, even at 102 years old. He seemed like a good guy who also took […]

Should You Try a Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting?

Just about half the patients we see in our office classify themselves as overweight and wish they weren’t. Not many are in the obese range, likely because when you come to a place called WholeHealth Chicago you’ve got a running start in being interested in health, well-being, and longevity. Still, weight is an issue for […]