Functional Medicine is without a doubt the fastest growing medical specialty of the 21st century. Public interest in it and public acceptance of it continues to please me. Every day I hear the sentence, “I made this appointment because I wanted a functional approach.” When I ask patients how they learned about it, the answer […]
Category: Fitness & Exercise
Fitness and exercise are important aspects of overall health and lifestyle medicine. Optimizing your fitness routine with exercise, nutrition, and other therapies (including infusion therapy and supplements) is very essential.
Moving and Eating To Protect Your Heart
One of the great pleasures of Chicago is summer. We’re outdoors and moving around, whether jogging, swimming, biking, walking the dog, slamming a volleyball, or tossing a Frisbee. And because we’re all wearing fewer clothes, we can tell in a single furtive glance if we’re happy with our weight. “Oh, well,” you think, “I might […]
Health Screening Offers: Should You Bother?
Like most people, you’ve received one of those brochures in the mail with a headline screaming something like “Health Screening Can Save Your Life!” They’re filled with photos of happy, healthy people on golf courses or with their grandchildren and are liberally sprinkled with quotes like, “Dan’s alive today because an ultrasound revealed his aneurysm.”
Pain And How We Perceive It
Many people suffering chronic pain and fatigue hear far too often the dismissive “it’s all in your head.” Dr. Edelberg has written frequently on the destructive nature of this statement, which places all the blame on the patient and none on the physician to dig deeper into the causes. As Dr. E wrote in a […]
Worrisome Dementia Report For Women and Steps To Take
We’ve always known there was a higher rate of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in women than in men, initially attributed to the fact that women live longer and that the decline in mental function occurred with age. This turned out to be wrong. At 65, a woman has a greater than one-in-six chance of […]
Will You Live Another Five Years?
Of course you might not want to know the answer to that. Or, having worked diligently on healthful eating and regular exercise, you may want to know if it will all pay off. Now, in a joint project between Swedish statisticians and a half million (!) volunteers in the UK, there’s a simple questionnaire that […]
Are Lifestyle Changes Impossible?
Many years ago, I became exhausted dealing with a friend who ignored my advice on living a healthy lifestyle. His attitude toward exercise was similar to Oscar Wilde’s “I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.” His attitude toward food, especially restaurant food, seemed too often that he didn’t care if […]
For A Longer Life…Stand Up Now!
By far the most common answer to my question, “Exercising these days?” is “Not enough.” This is usually accompanied by the briefest flicker of melancholy regret, as if by such a confession my patient has permanently abandoned the hopes and dreams of both a svelte body and enviable longevity. “Don’t worry,” I say, “It’s just […]
How To Not Die At Your Health Club
All things considered, most of us would prefer not to become acutely ill in a public place. You’d rather not faint at Macy’s, upchuck in a theatre lobby, or suddenly become aware of the Mount St. Helen’s rumbling in your intestines as you sit third row center at Orchestra Hall. If you trip and fall […]
A Marathon in Russia
I’ve been on vacation, traveling the back roads of Russia (which looks a lot like central Illinois) visiting ancient cathedrals and doing a great deal of walking. The trip was organized by a company I’ve been using for years, G Adventures, which brings together a small group (never more than 15 or so) of like-minded […]
Your Walking Pace, Thighs, and Longevity
I’m sure you shared my sense of relief when you read earlier this year that being a tad overweight actually was a positive in terms of lifespan. Not obese by any means, but a little chunky–husky if you will–was just fine. Researchers analyzed thousands of moderately overweight people and concluded that their all-cause mortality was […]
How I Exercise
With a title like that, I fully understand if you have an urge to hit the delete key. You endured a health tip a few weeks ago about my colonic, and I do applaud your strength for that. But now, having read in this week’s American Medical News that the US is the unhealthiest among […]
Helmet-Free Biking (Sometimes)
Chicago is in the process of selecting where to locate some 300 racks for its new bike-sharing program, delayed until Spring 2013 by politics (which will come as no surprise to any true Chicagoan). Modeled after similar programs in Canada and Europe, the bike-share program is simple. The racks are stocked with rental bikes. Swipe […]
How Much Exercise?
I owe the details of this health tip to Dr. Joseph S. Alpert, the physician-editor of the American Journal of Medicine. Since a subscription to this highly respectable journal is, for non-physicians, $166 a year, I’ll assume it’s not regularly thrust through your mail slot and share his article with you.
Will Alzheimer’s Skyrocket?
In 2006, the very dark comedy Idiocracy played local theatres for what seemed like a few hours before disappearing into DVD bins and obscure cable channels. Its Rip van Winkle story involves a not particularly bright Army librarian, recruited into a Pentagon hibernation program, awakening centuries into the future and finding himself the most intelligent person in America.
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.
Exercise and Weight Loss
The Time Magazine article that ran last week was food for thought for people who exercise regularly. Let’s face it, many of us who work out aren’t doing so to boost mood, enhance mental skills, prevent Alzheimer’s disease, or reduce heart attack risk–all of which exercise does–but rather to lose weight.
Cuts and Scrapes
After 40 years, you’d think I would have learned how to shave without leaving a piece of my face under the razor. And when I consider the cuts and scrapes that appear out of no where on my fingers and hands, I realize that someone in my family is always shouting for a bandage. During their routine check-ups, patients are constantly showing me kneecap scabs where they embarassingly tripped on a curb, or the shin recently scraped against a coffee table, or the long scratches left by an annoyed cat. In other words, whether we’re 7 or 70, we’ll always be victims to wounds of the flesh. Our WholeHealth Chicago recommendations will not help you become more coordinated, or more adept with sharp objects, but instead we offer a few simple ways to ease the pain and speed up the healing the next time you scratch, scrape, slice, or dice yourself.
Push Up, Trim Down
If push-ups bring forth the dim (and grim) memory of gym class, stay with us for a minute while we discuss the benefits.
Antioxidants and Exercise
Click here for the original post. If you study nutritional medicine long enough, some concepts make good intuitive sense, but then you find nobody has done a study to verify the assumptions. It’s always struck me that if you did aerobic exercise–you know, the huff-puff of jumping jacks or other high-intensity activity–you’d get a greater […]