“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 […]
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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, […]
Women and ADD: Part Two
In my last Health Tip, we discussed Claire, a woman in her thirties with attention deficit disorder (ADD), reviewing lifestyle and non-medication approaches. This week, I’ll go over the conventional medications used for this very common condition (estimated at 5% of the population). Let me start by saying that untreated ADD, in both children and […]
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 […]
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 […]
May, June, July: Covid, Ticks, Long Haul, Chronic Lyme, What Next? Oh My!!
COVID-19 is certainly still with us. Last week, the U.S. death toll crossed the one million mark. Suburban Evanston returned to the high-risk zone for COVID transmission, yet much of Illinois, especially downstate, remains woefully unvaccinated (only 37% are VAXed and boosted). I receive at least three or four emails a day, variations on “flu-like […]
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: Here’s How Sugar Accelerates Aging
Look, I know there’s a good chance you may be addicted to sugar. Lots of us are. Human taste buds are far more sensitive to sweet tastes than they are to the subtleties of superstar chefs. Food manufacturers today throw sugar into everything, from chili to coleslaw, and the total amount of sugar we eat […]
Longevity Medicine: Chronic Anxiety Speeds Aging
A diagnosis of anxiety covers a lot of territory. Psychologists organize patients suffering symptoms of anxiety into groups that include: generalized anxiety disorder (with or without panic attacks), obsessive-compulsive disorders, social anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, and the various phobias (heights, snakes, germs, etc.). However, the symptoms are all pretty much the same. According to […]
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 […]
Ubiquitous Autoimmune Conditions
Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: there are more than 100 different autoimmune conditions and they collectively cause more chronic illness and disability in women than heart disease and cancer combined. Men can get autoimmune diseases too, but the predominance in women (2:1) is striking and also puzzling, though current thinking attributes this susceptibility […]
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 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 […]
Covid Immunization: Facts, Not Fiction
If you don’t feel like reading one more word about Covid-19, you’ve got my sympathy. However, if you’re inclined, scan this Health Tip and perhaps pick up a fact or two you didn’t know. Want to jump to my take-away? It’s this: When the vaccine is available to you, take it and thank your lucky […]
Covid-19 Worries
You may have noticed fewer Health Tips about Covid-19 recently, which might have struck you as odd given our dreadful numbers here in the US. Well, there was a reason for this. WholeHealth Chicago was one of hundreds of health-oriented websites that were sent cease-and-desist warning letters from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging widespread […]
Covid-19: Good News, Bad News
Before I get into this, I’m still shaking my head in disbelief at my recent brush with accidental carbon monoxide poisoning as I sat in my car glued to the NPR program ironically called “Fresh Air.” Really, it wasn’t even a close call, just me blurting out loud to myself “Did you really just close […]