Posted 04/07/2014 The statistics are simply staggering. The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 20 million people in the US, roughly 10% of the population, have depression, defined as a recurring major depressive disorder, a constant state of depression (dysthymia), or bipolar disorder. Officially, these three are called mood disorders, considered separate from […]
Ticked Off: Lyme’s Mystery Illness
In H.G. Wells’ novel (and Steven Spielberg’s movie) War of the Worlds, aliens invade Earth fully intending to destroy it. Despite our best efforts to defend ourselves, we’re clearly losing until suddenly all the aliens start dying off. Scientists later discover the aliens had no immunity against Earth’s bacteria. The evil aliens were out of […]
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 […]
You Can Survive The Healthcare System
The entire healthcare system is rapidly changing. Despite the flaws in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I believe it’s a positive that virtually everyone now has access to medical care. When one of America’s poorest states, West Virginia, enrolled tens of thousands of impoverished citizens over a period of a few weeks, physicians observed a […]
We Want You To Die
It’s funny how the mind works. You find yourself in a particular situation and as you mull over what to do, all of a sudden up pops a line from a movie. Good old Freud, always reliable when it comes to mining your subconscious. The question, from the aliens-invade-earth action flick Independence Day, is posed […]
Are You Hypometabolic?
First, because the word metabolism is involved with virtually everything in our bodies, it helps to know exactly what we’re talking about. “Metabolism” means the sum total of all the chemical processes going on inside you that are necessary to keep you alive. When your metabolic rate is normal you feel pretty good. If it’s […]
The Saga of Dr. Lasko
I need to complete the chronicle of Keith Alan Lasko, MD, begun last week in my Health Tip Pigs At A Trough with the story of the physician who wrote The Great Billion Dollar Medical Swindle some 35 years ago and then seemed to vanish. But completely disappear? Hardly. Based on what I’ve been reading […]
Pigs At A Trough
Posted 02/17/2014 I regularly revisit last year’s Time Magazine Special Report “Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” with the same conflicted feeling I had at about age six when I learned that something painful, like picking a scab or jiggling a loose tooth, also afforded a secret pleasure that could not be shared with friends. […]
Case Study: Why Is My Hair Falling Out?
Barbara was 30 and what she’d written on her WholeHealth Chicago form certainly didn’t match her appearance. On the first line, “My hair is falling out!” And on the second, “Tired!” Physically she looked healthy, but her face reflected a worried shadow. “I know it looks like I have a lot of hair,” she began, […]
Foods That May Harm Your Brain
Posted 02/03/2014 This intriguing idea is the lead article in this week’s Medscape Internal Medicine, a newsletter directed to internists like myself. It’s genuinely refreshing to read research that doesn’t extol some new pharmaceutical, but rather encourages simple changes in how we eat to prevent and even treat common emotional problems. Before I get to […]
Fresh Approaches To Fatigue and Fibromyalgia, Hormone Update, and A New Book on Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
For the millions who suffer with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, I’m pleased to report some worthy breakthroughs in the past few weeks. First, from the American College of Rheumatologists meeting in San Diego: Speaker and Tel Aviv physician Jacob Ablin, MD, described what I believe is a long-overdue paradigm shift in the diagnosis and treatment […]
“Take These Pills Or You’ll Die!”
Six months ago, while visiting my 90-year-old Fox News/Don Imus devotee aunt in Florida, I was working out at the local health club and got into a conversation with a lean, muscular older guy who’d just finished his bench presses. I bemoaned the fact that there was so little to do in that part of […]
Cancer Screening: Overdiagnosed, Overtreated, and Blind to the Risks?
Posted 01/12/2014 At first blush, cancer screening seems like a no-brainer, sort of like getting your teeth cleaned. You don’t relish the project, but you know it’s good for you. And if a screening detects a God-forbid-bite-your-tongue-don’t-say-the-word diagnosis, at least you’ve likely caught it early. Oh, were life so straightforward. Ponder this a moment. When […]
Big Pharma Controls Your Doctor’s Brain
Two themes this week. First, on the very same morning I sent out last week’s Health Tip expressing my dismay at an Annals of Internal Medicine article and editorial advising physicians to discourage patients from using multiple vitamins a new study from Germany showed that vitamin D deficiency was strongly linked to fatal heart attacks […]
Conventional Medicine Bashes Supplements (Again)
Posted 12/24/2013 The nutritional supplement industry took a few body blows this month from conventional medicine, with several reports published in the Annals of Internal Medicine regarding the effectiveness of daily vitamins and minerals. An accompanying editorial urged physicians to discourage their patients from taking supplements altogether. Moreover, the editorial suggested the government should stop […]
It’s That SAD Time Again
Right now, mid-December, if you happen to be sitting in a room with five of your friends, the odds are strong that one of you has seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. If you’re the one, you’re probably in your 20s or early 30s (the vulnerable years for SAD, though you can have it at any age), you know […]
Fruitcake, Genes, and Exercise: A Spooky Holiday Story
Starting around Thanksgiving and generally ending on January 2, we’re surrounded by too much food. Many of us who spent 2013 really (really!) trying to lose weight and eat healthfully dread the havoc these dark December days can wreak on our bodies. It’s agonizingly easy to add some pounds. Then, come January, we despair at […]
Angelina Jolie, BRCA Testing, and You
The extremely talented actress and director Angelina Jolie made world news last May when she revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she’d taken the proactive step of having both breasts removed to prevent dying of breast cancer, as her own mother had at age 56. Jolie had learned that she had a specific, […]
Chilling Health Care News
It’s tempting to begin this health tip with “Here’s the news from Lake Wobegone…” You’ll soon discover why as I tell you about two recent articles of note. Also, I’d be most interested in your interpretation from a health care consumer’s point of view. The first article, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, reported […]