About 25 years ago, when I was organizing what today is WholeHealth Chicago, I attempted to learn everything I could about all the fields of what was then called alternative medicine. Since naturopathic medicine, or naturopathy, didn’t really exist in Illinois (perpetually blocked by the Illinois State Medical Society), I flew to the west coast […]
Category: Knowledge Base
Chronic Lyme Disease: Best Testing, Best Treatment
Last week I suggested if you’ve been suffering longstanding but otherwise unexplained symptoms, a long-ago tick bite might be an overlooked possibility and you could now be dealing with chronic Lyme disease. I added that your recovery may well be delayed by some totally unnecessary and immature bickering among physicians about the correct name for […]
Chronic Lyme Disease? Me? Are You Serious?
Yes, I am serious. These days, from what we’re learning about Lyme disease (more about its specific terminology later), anything is possible. If you regard yourself as healthy and were asked, “Overall, how do you feel?” and you answered “Just fine, thanks,” then Lyme in any form is very unlikely and testing you would be […]
Case History: The Madness of Overmedication
You’d think knowing that the fourth leading cause of death in the US is correctly-taken prescription drugs would push physicians to prescribe fewer of them. But the facts haven’t entered the collective brain of the medical profession. Big Pharma advertising controls both that brain and yours with its ubiquity of magazine, internet, and TV ads […]
When Your Female Sex Drive Is Circling The Drain
I don’t mean to catch you mid-croissant on this topic, but it may have recently dawned on you that your sex drive is not what it was when you were younger. In fact, when you think about it, maybe you never had much of a sex drive at all, no matter which of your decades […]
Case Study: High Blood Pressure
Phyllis B. was a longtime patient of mine whose medical problems were happily under control and who usually came in only for annual check-ups. As I’d just seen her last month, I expected today’s visit meant some new problem had emerged. “I’m here for Kirk,” she began. I’d only met her husband once, years earlier. […]
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, was that he didn’t care much about quality […]
Case Study: Tracy’s Eczema From Hell
She had wisely trimmed her fingernails to avoid injuring her own skin, but as she sat in my office she continuously rubbed one part of her body or another with the ball of her thumb in order to relieve the itching. Tracy was in her 20s and accompanied by her mother. Although I could see […]
Male Menopause: Is It Real?
Short answer: Yes, but don’t hope for any quick fixes—that’s pharmaceutical industry-think. Another way to view male menopause: Sure, a ball will bounce, just not as high over time. I get asked about male menopause all the time, almost always by women (who, admittedly, represent the majority of my patients) and only rarely by my […]
How To Not Gain Weight
Please note this Health Tip will not tell you how to lose weight. If you want to browse the offerings on that topic, go to amazon and search for diet books. Once our largest bookstore attempted to track the numbers, but when they surpassed 95,000 it apparently gave up and now tell us that the […]
Lyme Disease: A Biological Weapon Gone Awry
Prepare yourself for a genuinely frightening Health Tip. I bought Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, by investigative reporter Kris Newby, this past Saturday at 10 am and finished it at 8 pm. It reads more like a thriller than non-fiction and is chilling in its implications. First, some background: The […]
A Lifetime Of Experience With Abortion
The past two years of a Trump administration have produced an ugly upsurge in controversy over women’s rights, from the serial sexual predation revelations of the #MeToo movement to yet another state following the lead of the 25 white male Republicans (for their photos, click here) who voted to ban abortion in Alabama and send […]
Chronic Epstein-Barr Infection: Diagnosis and Self Treatment
Once, maybe long ago, you came down with variation of mono, what your doctor called infectious mononucleosis. You have the antibodies in your blood to prove it. These are antibodies to a specific human herpesvirus (called human herpesvirus 4), better known as Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Back then, you may have felt a sudden onset of […]
Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV): Trouble On The Horizon
A quick blood test will verify that 98% of you are carrying an inactive form of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), one of several herpesviruses (human herpesvirus 4, to be exact) that can rest quietly in your body. You hope. That high percentage is confirmed by testing large populations for the presence of EBV antibodies, produced by […]
Ozone Therapy: What It Is and How It’s Used
I’ll spare you a migraine. Don’t google “ozone therapy” as you’ll get 2.1 million results in 0.35 seconds. And while this is a mere fraction of what happens when you search for “migraine” (80 million in 1.19 seconds), just reading about the controversy over ozone therapy in first 20 entries might be enough to give […]
I Feel So Inflamed!
And among other symptoms, indeed she was. Julia, a bright 40-something, had written “fatigue,” “pain,” “bad digestion,” and “brain fog” on her WholeHealth Chicago intake paperwork. She’d been ill for years and brought with her two binders full of medical info on herself. The thicker of these contained accumulated medical records, lab tests, imaging studies, […]
“I’m Really Confused About Sun Exposure”
Julie was heading for an all-inclusive week in Cancun to loll on a vast expanse of beach, soaking up rays and having someone named Juan bring her endless pina coladas (she planned to get her money’s worth). Sounded pretty nice to me. After months of Chicago overcast/gray, it seemed like a perfect way to put […]
Here’s What You Should Know About Lyme Disease
In H.G. Wells’s 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 to Earth’s bacteria. The evil aliens were out of their […]
Welcome, Neeti Sharma, MD + A Functional Medicine Primer
I’m truly delighted to welcome our newest WholeHealth Chicago staff member, Neeti Sharma, MD, a board-certified internist (like me) who earned additional postgrad training in integrative medicine at Dr. Andrew Weil’s program at the University of Arizona Medical School. She also has a special interest in Functional Medicine. Any health-conscious patient with reasonable skepticism about […]
Meet Our New Integrative Nurse Practitioner Wendy Ploegstra
WholeHealth Chicago is extremely fortunate to welcome Advanced Nurse Practitioner Wendy Ploegstra into our group. Let’s take a look at her credentials. First, she starts in nursing, receiving her bachelor’s at Calvin College in Grand Rapids before moving to Chicago and enrolling at Rush University, where she receives her master’s as a nurse practitioner (with […]