This all started with a postcard I received from Northwestern, “Do You Have Difficulty Walking?”, beckoning me to enter the FIRST research study. This is not “first,” like “first, second,” but an acronym (not mentioned on the card) for quite a mouthful: Fisetin to Reduce Senescence and Mobility Impairment in Peripheral Artery Disease. “Fisetin?”, I […]
Category: Nutrition, Nutritional Supplements, Vitamins, & Herbal Remedies
Nutritional counseling focuses on helping clients understanding foods and their role in preventive nutrition. Nutrition, supplements, vitamins and herbal remedies help achieve and maintain healthy body composition, (lean muscle-to-fat ratio) in order to improve health, manage disease, feel better, and reduce the risk of serious conditions.
TREATING YOUR EPSTEIN BARR FLARES
We’ll now pick up from last week’s Health Tip on chronic Epstein Barr infection, a/k/a chronic mononucleosis. Once, usually in your teens or twenties, you had a doozy of a sore throat, swollen glands in your neck, a fever, and were exhausted, maybe even pain on the left side of your abdomen from a swollen […]
PRESERVE YOUR BRAIN, PREVENT DEMENTIA, AND AN AMAZING TEST BREAKTHROUGH
As a quick introduction: when I write theses Health Tips, I usually flip through medical journals and medical libraries. Most often I’ll refer (or rather I sadly once referred) to the National Library of Medicine. This astonishing resource of worldwide medical research is now history. Here’s what appears when you click to it. Trump cut […]
COLON CANCER ON THE RISE AMONG PEOPLE UNDER 50
You may find this a bit unbelievable but as recently as the 1960’s there was still a debate about whether smoking caused lung cancer. Many doctors puffed happily away, even in hospital corridors and advised the same of their patients. The smokiest room in any hospital was the Doctors’ Lounge. The reason for this protracted […]
A CHECKLIST OF OVERLOOKED CAUSES OF CHRONIC FATIGUE
If there’s one single symptom that brings patients most frequently into the offices of WholeHealth Chicago, it’s this: “I’m tired all the time and doctors can’t find anything wrong.” The “can’t find” you all are experiencing is the real problem of today’s health care system. It’s that notorious fifteen-minute medical encounter of primary care medicine: […]
ANTI-AGING BASICS
Slowing the rate at which you age isn’t just for old people trying to stay on the topside of the sod… If you’re under 40, supplements can provide plenty of coverage and set a perfectly reasonable goal of reaching your upper 90s or early 100s. Do understand that living a long life isn’t much use if […]
COVID FINALLY CATCHES ME AND RELATED COVID NEWS
This then explained my tickly cough and progressively worsening sore throat. My BinaxNOW Home Test was “positive”, so I phoned in Paxlovid for myself.
NAD+: Getting Serious About Anti-Aging Therapy
We’re living in a time of major, worldwide breakthroughs when it comes to understanding how we age and also the steps we can take to not only slow down aging, but to all appearances reverse the process. Over history, the fountain of youth seekers came, literally and figuratively, to dead ends, but back then Ponce […]
Beyond the Symptoms: The Hidden Impact of PCOS
A recent report revealed the enormous impact of PCOS hidden symptoms, with diagnosis and lifetime treatments costing the U.S. around $8 billion a year. Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affects up to 20% of reproductive-age women—yet most remain undiagnosed for years. If you have PCOS, obviously you’re not alone. It’s estimated that PCOS affects one woman in […]
A GENUINELY USEFUL BLOOD TEST
Many a time, either in person or via phone, someone will say a variation of the following, “Look, I’m taking all these vitamins and minerals but I really don’t know what I’m doing. I think I’m eating right but I might have some vitamin or mineral deficiencies that I know nothing about. I really don’t […]
NON-CELIAC GLUTEN SENSITIVITY: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY
Here’s a diagnosis that doctors only started thinking about as recently as the 1980’s and now, decades later, although there are now plenty of gluten free items available both in grocery stores and on restaurant menus, doctors are still arguing about its existence. Many don’t even mention it to their patients with irritable bowel syndrome. “Why […]
CHANGING ‘ANTI-AGING’ TO ‘HEALTHY LONGEVITY’
We’re living in a time of major, worldwide breakthroughs when it comes to understanding how we age and also the steps we can take to not only slow down aging, but even reverse it a bit. A reader suggested she was tired of the term ‘anti-aging’. She wasn’t against ‘aging’, and in fact, rather enjoyed […]
VITAMIN B-12: OUR MOST POTENT VITAMIN
Over the years of writing Health Tips, I was surprised to discover that one I’d written a few years ago about Vitamin B 12 Deficiency had received the most comments and questions from readers. Since there have been some interesting developments in both the diagnosis and treatment of B12 deficiency, and since B12 deficiency remains […]
WHEN YOU’RE NOT GETTING HELP WITH YOUR THYROID
Let’s start with two thyroid facts: The diagnosis of hypothyroidism (low levels of thyroid hormone) is missed by most physicians. Patients arrive with obvious symptoms of hypothyroidism every doctor learned in medical school: sensitivity to cold, hair loss, weight gain, dry skin, fatigue, constipation, depression, irregular periods, and infertility. The doctor listens, sometimes attentively, and […]
The Supplement I Love Most: 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 […]
COLOSTRUM: IS IT WORTH ADDING YET ANOTHER SUPPLEMENT?
The word keeps popping up in emails from patients, and I’m seeing it more and more on their smoothie “lists”. Then, when I saw an article in the Washington Post about colostrum, I thought I’d better write about it myself. Colostrum was your first taste of food when you were born, the first milk produced […]
Delay Aging and Monitor Your Progress
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 […]
UNDERSTANDING CANDIDA, ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Patients come to WholeHealth Chicago regularly with this common refrain: “You’re the fourth (or seventh or tenth) doctor I’ve seen. I feel terrible but am always told that my tests are normal and there’s nothing wrong with me.” Then they’ll add: “I read about Candida overgrowth and the symptoms seem to fit me exactly. I […]
CASE STUDY: ECZEMA FROM HELL
Tracy 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. Dermatologists sometimes refer to this as, “The itch that rashes, rather than the rash […]
WOMEN LIVE LONGER THAN MEN, BUT AT A PRICE
The blurb about women’s health was tucked into a corner of The Guardian and required some tracking on my part to locate the source. It was a report (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in Lancet Public Health, that I fear will largely be ignored, that is a general call-to-action jumpstart for worldwide […]