The Lancet is a British medical journal that has been in continuous publication since 1823. Arriving each week in my mailbox (though not since its inception!), The Lancet has always been worth more than the routine glance I give to the rest of my mail. Unlike any US medical journal, it provides a truly global […]
Category: Knowledge Base
The Leviathan Swims In The Swill: Too Much Money To Ever Fix The System
I’m not quite sure where to go with this. Each week I flip through dozens of medical articles in an attempt to find one or two interesting health care developments you may not have read about. This week, I found myself tossing one article after another into a stack I mentally labeled “greed and its […]
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 […]
Notes From The Underground
It was the Summer Solstice this past weekend and people all over the northern hemisphere celebrated in huge gatherings of what UNESCO calls an “intangible cultural heritage.” Not knowing if we have a lot of pagan or druid Health Tip readers, in case you couldn’t make it to Stonehenge here’s a nice link on 11 […]
Are You Addicted To Food?
Being addicted to anything, from crystal meth, heroin, or prescription drugs to tobacco, alcohol, the internet, or exercise, is a lot more common–and a lot more complicated–than you might think. Perhaps the best way to view addiction is as a loss of control, whether it’s something you’re ingesting (called substance dependence) or something you’re doing […]
MSG In The News Again (And A Personal Story)
It’s seems we’ve always been worrying ourselves about the health consequences of MSG, the world’s most popular flavor enhancer. That’s because monosodium glutamate has been around for more than a century, invented by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1909, when the professor extracted a substance from a species of seaweed and realized it had a […]
Cynicism and Diet Sodas
I must admit that my immediate response to an article linking cynical distrust to dementia hit home. When you read dozens of medical articles every week, a few inevitably apply to you. “Oh, dear,” I thought. “I’m known to be pretty cynical. I’d recently mislaid both my keys and wallet in one day. Maybe I’m […]
The Aching Man And The Sweaty Woman
New patient Phil told me he’d been suffering muscle pain every single day for more than eight years. He’d seen neurologists and rheumatologists, had had an MRI of his spine, was told he had spinal stenosis (narrowing), had cortisone shots, and recently had been scheduled for neurosurgery. Then a friend told him to stop taking […]
Are Generic Drugs Different? You Bet!
Posted 05/19/2014 Bob lay wide awake at 2 AM, wondering if he’d even taken his Ambien. Melissa’s hands and feet felt cold and she was losing hair. She knew these underactive thyroid symptoms well and quickly scheduled an appointment to ask about increasing what she thought was her Synthroid prescription. Despite enjoying a relatively calm […]
Case Study: The Rivet In The Soprano’s Neck
Every physician knows that diagnostic skills improve with age. After years of working with patients, eventually you see just about everything that can happen to the human body. The annoying corollary is that, more and more often, you find yourself saying to your patients, “Actually, I’ve had this myself.” This case study concerns poor Renee, […]
My Favorite Herb: St. John’s Wort
It’s really annoying the way the pharmaceutical industry snookered US physicians over the herbal antidepressant St. John’s wort. If only the profession had been just a little skeptical of an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a while back we might not be as up to our bellybuttons in […]
My Favorite Supplement: Magnesium
Along with most things relating to good nutrition, I wasn’t taught much of anything about supplemental magnesium either in medical school or during my internal medicine residency. It was a professional clinical nutritionist I met during a long-ago meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association who first told me, “You’ll never go wrong if you […]
Obama Kvells, Docs Report Misery, and A Modest Proposal
Kvell is a Yiddish word meaning super happy and proud. My grandmother, for example, kvelled when I actually got my MD degree, even though she’d been calling me Dr. Edelberg since I was two. This week, it was President Obama’s turn to kvell. He’d received great news about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which, now […]
Depression, Anxiety, and Acupuncture: A Major Breakthrough
Posted 04/07/2014 The statistics are simply staggering. The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 20 million people in the US, roughly 10% of the population, have depression, defined as a recurring major depressive disorder, a constant state of depression (dysthymia), or bipolar disorder. Officially, these three are called mood disorders, considered separate from […]
Ticked Off: Lyme’s Mystery Illness
In H.G. Wells’ novel (and Steven Spielberg’s movie) War of the Worlds, aliens invade Earth fully intending to destroy it. Despite our best efforts to defend ourselves, we’re clearly losing until suddenly all the aliens start dying off. Scientists later discover the aliens had no immunity against Earth’s bacteria. The evil aliens were out of […]
Clip-N-Save: Your Healthcare Under the Affordable Care Act
Posted 03/24/2014 A hip replacement should not cost $13,000 in Iowa and $130,000 in New Jersey. That’s just crazy. Virtually everyone agrees that under our existing healthcare system the price of services–from a five-minute office visit to an appendectomy–needs some kind of regulation and standardization. And yet the standardization of prices is definitely not the […]
In-Network or Out-of-Network Physician: What’s Best For You?
Few patients truly grasp what it means when your primary care physician contracts into an insurance network. Actually, until doctors (including me!) have been under contract for a few years, we’re sort of confused about it ourselves. And it doesn’t help that in-network contracts vary widely among health insurance companies. Basically, the in-network doctor has […]
You Can Survive The Healthcare System
The entire healthcare system is rapidly changing. Despite the flaws in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I believe it’s a positive that virtually everyone now has access to medical care. When one of America’s poorest states, West Virginia, enrolled tens of thousands of impoverished citizens over a period of a few weeks, physicians observed a […]
We Want You To Die
It’s funny how the mind works. You find yourself in a particular situation and as you mull over what to do, all of a sudden up pops a line from a movie. Good old Freud, always reliable when it comes to mining your subconscious. The question, from the aliens-invade-earth action flick Independence Day, is posed […]
The Saga of Dr. Lasko
I need to complete the chronicle of Keith Alan Lasko, MD, begun last week in my Health Tip Pigs At A Trough with the story of the physician who wrote The Great Billion Dollar Medical Swindle some 35 years ago and then seemed to vanish. But completely disappear? Hardly. Based on what I’ve been reading […]