“My hormones are out of whack!” That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients. It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less […]
Testosterone Replacement For Men: Probably A Good Idea
It’s an interesting phenomenon that more women ask about testosterone therapy for the men in their lives than men ask for themselves. And when a man does ask, the question is usually couched with hesitations, “Uh, my…wife wanted me to…uh…ask about…you know…testosterone.” There are good reasons for hesitation. For men, the symptoms of age-related testosterone […]
Tired All The Time? Useful Info and Two Supplements
As you might expect, fatigue is a fairly common reason people visit doctors. Feeling tired is vague symptom and can be linked to dozens of possible diagnoses, plus there’s a need to differentiate between physical fatigue and mental fatigue (brain fog) or consider both. When your doctor or nurse practitioner starts to ask questions, she’s […]
Trump, Stress, and Your Body
Every time I’ve written a politically oriented Health Tip, a few people become upset by my Lefty opinions, tell me to stick with what I know (I assume they mean medicine), and unsubscribe to this newsletter. Some have snarled, “I’m transferring my records out of WholeHealth Chicago” and off they go. So, here I go […]
Invasion of the Body Snatchers!
I’d been reading Ally Hilfiger’s new autobiography Bite Me: How Lyme Disease Stole My Childhood, Made Me Crazy, and Almost Killed Me, preferring the Lyme parts to those devoted to fashion and her MTV “Rich Girl” series. Her symptoms were typical of chronic Lyme and simply dreadful. Hilfiger’s very supportive family watched helplessly through hospitalizations […]
Making It Easier To Say No To Statins
Patients and doctors alike are understandably nervous about taking/prescribing any of the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins. You as a patient especially don’t want to hear “You’ll be on this pill for the rest of your life.” And if you’ve followed some of the recent articles on statins, you’ve likely felt annoyance at the mixed […]
More Serious Questions About Prescription Drugs
Let me start with some statistics that both patients and health care professionals would probably prefer not to ponder: Nearly 70% of all Americans are taking one or more prescription drugs, the most commonly prescribed being antibiotics (17%), antidepressants (13%), and opioids (13%). The usefulness and safety of prescription drugs are supposed to be controlled by […]
Rabbit-Hole Medicine: Are Too Many Specialists Dangerous To Your Health?
Many years ago, shortly after I’d finished my residency training, rather than opening a medical office I took a job in a tiny town in northern Minnesota covering a general practitioner’s practice while he took a well-deserved vacation. He was the sort of doctor who could do just about everything, including attending the births of […]
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 […]
New Hope for Binge Eaters
That box of chocolate chip cookies you never should have purchased in the first place is sitting there on your kitchen table, luring you, taunting. Your period is due in two or three days and you feel grumpy, depressed, bloated. You’re agonizing. “Just a…couple/two, three at the most” you think, knowing you’ll actually feel emotionally […]
Immunizing Your Kids
At least once a week someone asks my opinion on mandatory immunization, I suppose because WholeHealth Chicago is so widely known as an alternative medical center. Most often, the inquirer is pregnant and she’s read something about the (totally disproven) link between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and autism. Another question is whether vaccines contain mercury, […]
Big Pharma Kicks Us In The Teeth (Again)
One day last week, the top five most-read stories in the New York Times were all about Mylan, the generic drug manufacturer and owner of the EpiPen, a pre-filled syringe of epinephrine used for severe allergic reactions. Mylan didn’t invent the EpiPen. It just bought the company that developed it. For years, EpiPens were $100 […]
The Life-Changing Magic of Getting Rid of Your Late Aunt’s Stuff
I’d been reading with real fascination about the Japanese writer Marie Kondo and her worldwide bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, when I received word that my 93-year-old aunt was at Death’s Door. I flew to Florida and must say she had as peaceful an end as anyone could hope for, in a hospice […]
Acupuncture Getting The Respect It Deserves
Before President Nixon opened up US relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, Americans knew virtually nothing about acupuncture. It had been mentioned in an 1892 medical textbook by the renowned physician Sir William Osler as a treatment for sciatica, but back then opium, morphine, cocaine, and pure heroin were all available over-the-counter […]
Getting Tough With Your Immune System
Originally published Dec 2015 No reasonable physician (I modestly include myself here) can refrain from crowing delightedly when a new clinical study confirms the value of a treatment he or she had been using for years, even if that treatment had contradicted prevailing standards. Ever since I learned something about natural medicine, I’ve been reluctant to […]
Physicians And Empathy
I recently read an essay by a woman who described her experiences being employed as a medical actor. She’d been hired, along with some retirees, local theater majors, and a few people who were just curious, to play the role of patient in a training program for a local medical school. To start, she was […]
Fish Oil: Finally Some Solid Answers
In the 1970s, epidemiologic studies discovered that Inuit (the indigenous people of the Arctic regions Canada, Alaska, and Greenland), whose diet was extremely rich in fish, had a much lower rate of heart disease than Americans and Europeans. Scientists attributed this to the omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in fish, which seemed to protect and […]
Two More Orgasms Per Month? Why Not?
I was at dinner with an old physician colleague of mine who happens to be French. Despite living in the Midwest for decades, he continues his lifetime subscription to Le Monde and preserves–no, cultivates–his accent so efficiently that I miss about ten percent of what he’s saying. Given we were both well into our second […]
Project Microbiome: Bacterial Happiness and Health
A short article tucked in the New York Times health blog “Well” reported on a Cornell University study published in Microbiome, an obscure medical journal whose circulation is likely in the upper two digits. To my mind, it’s an important piece of research and I’d guess that years from now as we understand more and […]
Could Alzheimer’s Be Prevented By Antibiotics or Antivirals?
Quite some time ago during my internal medicine residency, articles began to appear in medical journals advancing the idea that stomach ulcers might be caused by bacteria. Mainly, I remember how dismissive most gastroenterologists were of this idea. “It is utterly impossible,” said one lecturer, “that any bacteria could survive in the intense acidity of […]