Last week we began a short series on preventing cancer. Obviously there are no guarantees when it comes to your health. You can do everything exactly right and still get cancer while the next guy lives a life on the edge and dies at 104 with a whisky in one hand and a cigar in […]
Category: Preventive Medicine
The goal of preventive medicine is to promote health and well-being and prevent disease, disability, and death. Preventive testing and treatments can include men’s and women’s health panels, physical exams, brain health, and diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention.
My Sad-Happy Health Tip
Just about a year ago my business partner of 20 years, chiropractic physician Paul Rubin, began our private Monday morning meeting (This Week at WholeHealth Chicago) with an ominous “I think I should tell you something important.” Naturally, I froze. He’d never use that tone if it were simply a broken heating system or phones […]
How To Get Off Statins
Getting off statins is easy. Stop swallowing the pill. If you’re not in a potentially high-risk group (as described below) and your doc prescribed a statin to get your cholesterol down a bit, you won’t have a heart attack or a stroke that day or week or probably that decade.
Pushing Your Wellness Exam Into The 21st Century
Patients ask me, “What about those wellness exams my health insurance company says I’m entitled to every year at no cost?” Bad news. Let’s review one of life’s basic rules: you get what you pay for. What you receive during your short wellness visit (what many consider a sacrosanct ritual that boosts longevity) is little […]
Osteopenia and Osteoporosis, Part 2
Last week in Part 1 we wrote an overview of osteoporosis and osteopenia. I couldn’t help but note that most US physicians can date their knowledge of both diagnosis and treatment to the saturation marketing of Big Pharma’s variety of osteoporosis medications, most notably the bisphosphonates (Fosamax, Boniva, Reclast). As we all get older, our […]
Osteopenia and Osteoporosis, Part 1
As is the case with many of our contemporary ailments, it was a combination of Baby Boomer longevity, the ready availability of devices to measure bone density, and Big Pharma creativity that taught both patients and physicians about osteopenia (low bone mineral density) and its more serious consequence, osteoporosis, in which bones become brittle and […]
Reversing Mental Decline and Preventing Alzheimer’s
Reversing Mental Decline and Preventing Alzheimer’s, Part 1 You saw a movie last week and in discussing it with friends simply can’t remember the important parts. Plus you just missed another appointment. Planning to drive to a north suburb, you instead got on the southbound expressway and after 15 minutes of Loop traffic realized your […]
Health Screening Offers: Should You Bother?
Like most people, you’ve received one of those brochures in the mail with a headline screaming something like “Health Screening Can Save Your Life!” They’re filled with photos of happy, healthy people on golf courses or with their grandchildren and are liberally sprinkled with quotes like, “Dan’s alive today because an ultrasound revealed his aneurysm.”
Seriously Spooky Sugar
When you walk into a Walgreens (“at the corner of happy and healthy”) and make your way past the cigarette section, you’ll soon hit the candy aisle. Halloween’s coming up and there are, without exaggeration, at least a thousand big bags of candy for you to pass out to unsuspecting children. This year, don’t do […]
The WholeHealth Chicago Wellness Exam
The WholeHealth Chicago Wellness Exam Patients new to WholeHealth Chicago, along with patients I’ve not seen for a while because they’ve felt good and sensibly wanted to avoid the health care system, often ask for a wellness check-up when they schedule an appointment. You’ve probably had variations of these exams throughout your life: kicking and […]
How Our Health Care System Created The Nazi Doctor
Last week I reported on the chilling story of Farid Fata, the Detroit oncologist (chemotherapy specialist) sentenced to 45 years in jail for fraud after stealing millions of dollars in medical fees because he administered inappropriate chemotherapy to hundreds of patients, many of whom did not have cancer at all. I mentioned that Fata’s crime […]
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, seemed too often that he didn’t care if […]
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 […]
Our Statin Nation
Although they don’t know who they are, 11 million Americans awakened last week as victims of a new disease, the dreaded “statin deficiency disorder,” or SDD. It’s not easy to diagnose because there are no symptoms. Even the lab test once closely linked to the word “statin”—cholesterol measuring–may miss SDD. In fact, with no symptoms […]
Welcome Dr. Kristen Donigan
This health tip is especially exciting for me as I have the pleasure of announcing that a new physician, Kristen Donigan, DO, has joined WholeHealth Chicago and is available for appointments. After a decade of trying to find my first physician associate, I felt blessed when Casey Kelley, MD, joined us, though I was concerned […]
Progress On Prostate Cancer
Please forward this to all the MEN on your contact list. Having an aging prostate gland myself, I do follow the trends in preventing, diagnosing, and treating prostate cancer, an extremely common but fortunately not highly lethal disease. It’s been said, for example, that every man, if he lives long enough, will eventually develop prostate […]
State of Our Health Mega-Study: A Poor Report
The new movie “Elysium” is set in Los Angeles, 2154 AD, nearly 150 years into the future. The city is utterly unrecognizable, the world in chaos–over-populated and crime-ridden, destroyed by wars, pollution, and serial economic catastrophes. Most everyone is brown-skinned, speaks an interesting Spanglish, and struggles in a subsistence existence, half starved, chronically diseased, living […]
Health News Roundup
I have a wire basket on my desk stacked with medical articles that merit my muttering, “This is useful. Might be handy for a future health tip.” On the plus side, they’re all undeniably of interest. On the minus, there’s not enough material in each article to merit a complete health tip. So this week […]
“Club Med” Diet
Posted 04/15/2013 I was surprised to learn that the much-revered Mediterranean Diet went back nearly 70 years to the work of American physician Ancel Keys, MD, stationed in Italy during World War II. Keys, who died in 2004 at age 100 (!), noted the very low incidence of heart disease and the excellent longevity among […]