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Brain-Boosting Supplements

In our previous two Health Tips, we discussed the most common causes of brain fog. The first of these focused on stress. When there’s so much you’re anxious about, your logical thinking, mental clarity, and memory become overwhelmed to the extent that you’ve added yet another stressor. “Is this early dementia?” you may wonder. Well […]

Brain Fog and What To Do About It, Part 1

You can’t remember the name of the Netflix movie you saw just last night, literally hours ago. And that actor–what was his name? He was in, you know, that other movie. You think it was a thriller, but maybe a war movie. Then you get a notice from Verizon that they’re turning off your phone […]

Welcome Nurse Practitioner Rachel Gates + Lifestyle Medicine 101

This week we welcome Rachel Gates, NP, to WholeHealth Chicago, where she joins nurse practitioners Katie McManigal and Wendy Ploegstra. Like Wendy, Rachel is specially trained in a new (and desperately needed) branch of healthcare called Lifestyle Medicine. More about that later. Indiana-born and raised, Rachel began her education at Purdue University, earning her RN […]

WholeHealth Chicago IV Therapies: Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation (UBI)

You should know that we follow the CDC safety guidelines and that all IV therapies are administered in a sanitized room by an appropriately attired staff member. You’ll be alone in the room during your 30- to 45-minute IV session, so bring something to read. I was as surprised as everyone else, including Anthony Fauci, […]

Conquering Candida: A Telemedicine Consultation

You might be reading this Health Tip from a town 40 miles north of Mobile, Alabama, or somewhere west of Pecos, New Mexico, and you might be thinking, “Well, this sounds exactly like what I’ve got but there’s no doctor around here who knows anything about it.” We hear you. You’re a victim of the […]

Diagnosing and Treating “Sewer Breath” via Telemedicine

Those are actually the words patients use to describe their breath, though sometimes it’s “poop breath.” The medical term for bad breath, as you probably know, is halitosis, so if you don’t mind I’ll stick with that. For some people, the self-perception of chronic halitosis is more socially isolating that anything demanded by Covid-19. At […]

Functional Telemedicine, Wherever You Are

All things considered, we’ve rather enjoyed our telemedicine interactions with patients. Doctoring this way also recently provided me with an Aha! moment. What I realized was that much of what we do as Functional Medicine specialists, both diagnosis and treatment, can be done online with you never leaving your home. Such a consultation would include […]

Should You Get The New Antibody Test for Covid-19?

Before I answer that, let me give you a quick tutorial about your immune system and how it deals with any virus–Covid-19, measles, hepatitis, seasonal flu, even the common cold. The mechanics of your immunity, which has kept you alive all these years, is pretty much the same from virus to virus. If you read […]

Surviving Covid-19…and Beyond

You were coughing, exhausted, achy, and you had a headache. If you breathed in quickly, you coughed a lot. You thought you might be a little short of breath, but wondered if you were just anxious. You actually managed to find a place to get tested. Someone inserted a cotton swab so deeply up your […]

Immune Superstar: Mushroom Blends

To support your immune system, it may be helpful to take one capsule of a good mushroom blend twice daily and eat actual mushrooms frequently, incorporating them into the many meals you’re now cooking at home. According to Paul Stamets, who knows more about fungi than anyone, there are an estimated one to two million […]

We Are Fighting For Our Lives: Covid-19 Update

This Health Tip might contain more about Covid-19 than you’ve read online or heard on a news program. It might even be more than you really care to know. Obviously we Americans we have some real challenges, far greater than many countries smaller and less “powerful” than the US. We’re running out of personal protective […]

Immune Superstar: Vitamin C

Exactly 50 years ago, in 1970, Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, published Vitamin C and the Common Cold. His research concluded that by taking large amounts of vitamin C (10 to 20 times the Recommended Daily Allowance/RDA) you would not only overcome any deficiencies but could boost your immune system enough to ward off […]

Immune Superstar: Zinc

Zinc picolinate, 50 mg daily. We’ve known for decades that the element zinc plays many significant roles in physiology, especially when it comes to the immune system. It’s also true that zinc-deficient individuals are more susceptible to a variety of diseases caused by bacteria and viruses. Zinc is a powerful playerIt’s involved in maintaining the […]

Taking Care of Yourself while Staying Home

Seeing Your Chiropractic Physician via Telemedicine? Absolutely! I know what you’re thinking. ‘How can you possibly give me an adjustment during a video conference?’  The short answer is I can’t, but when coming to our office for an in-person appointment is difficult or impossible, I can continue to help. As a chiropractic physician, I’ve been […]

“My Breath Smells Like Poop!”

Usually by the time someone comes to us at WholeHealth Chicago with this complaint, they’ve already taken the obvious route. Ralph, a healthy looking guy in his 30s and recently married despite his halitosis, had already seen: –His primary care physician, who wasn’t sure he noticed anything odd about Ralph’s breath at all, but suggested […]

It’s The Carbs. It’s Always Been The Carbs.

Somewhere in my library is a copy of Gary Taubes’ 2008 Good Calories, Bad Calories, one of several books that appeared in the wake of the really vicious controversy that surrounded Robert C. Atkins, MD’s Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which first appeared in 1972, has been published in 13 revisions and editions, and continues to […]

Infertility Issues? Start With The Guy

I’ve lost track of the number of couples we treat at WholeHealth Chicago who are involved in one of the hormone injection/surgical procedure stops on the conveyor belt of infertility centers. Currently, it’s estimated that 15 to 20 percent of couples are struggling with infertility, half of them due to male factors. The infertility docs […]

The Flu: How To Recognize It and What to Do

It’s here, folks, and this year could be a doozy. How do we know? We keep a watchful eye on Australia, whose winter and flu season occur six months before our own. The New York Times reported that “In 2017, a terrible flu season in Australia presaged an American outbreak in which 79,000 died. Experts […]

Enzymes for Health and Longevity

Until we got our plumbing overhauled, we’d been experiencing some real problems at WholeHealth Chicago, including clogged toilet drains that had bested some of Chicago’s top plumbers. After power rodding and chemicals, followed by actual pipe replacement, in the end we got everything working and didn’t have to send patients to the carwash next door […]

Heavy Metal Toxicity and Your Health

For those who were otherwise preoccupied that day long ago in high school chemistry, the heavy metals refer to a group of especially dense metals or metal-like substances (called metalloids) found in the environment. These metals–specifically lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and aluminum–can all be absorbed by your body and stored there. Our environment is already […]