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 […]
A Blood Test That Could Save Your Life
One of the most challenging decisions a primary care physician faces concerns preventing a heart attack in a patient who has risk factors, such as high cholesterol, and iffy symptoms like shoulder pain or shortness of breath. As a doctor, you’re uncertain whether or not you should work on the risk factors or send your […]
Physicians and Guns
I guess it should come as no surprise to anyone, the increasing number of articles in conventional medical journals about the health consequences of gun ownership. After all, each year more than 30,000 people are killed by a gun and another 70,000 are wounded. Add up the past decade and you get nearly one million […]
Are You An Accidental Orthorectic? It’s Possible…
I saw a pleasant but very worried 40-something woman a few weeks ago who had written on her intake form “Candida!” “Food allergies!” and “I don’t know what to eat!” To be honest, she didn’t look particularly healthy, likely because she was both poorly nourished and depressed. Her story is provocative. Many months earlier, feeling […]
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 […]
Psychiatry Has Gone Bonkers
It may come as a surprise to learn that 11% of Americans over age 6 are taking one or more psychoactive drugs (also called psychotropics) daily for various forms of mental illness. In fact the fastest growing population being prescribed psychoactive drugs are children between 2 and 11. Would it surprise you to learn that […]
Coping With Work Stress
You’d need to be a fly on the wall of my secluded little exam room at WholeHealth Chicago to realize how thoroughly day-to-day stress contributes to chronic physical and emotional ill health. Stress occurs when some force to which you’ve relinquished power controls your life. The source might be work, money, relationships, caregiving…or some grim […]
The Price of Your Doctor’s Declining Skills
I recently read that the skills involved in taking a patient’s medical history and performing a physical exam have declined as doctors become increasingly dependent on high-tech diagnostic equipment. Compared to medical education in years past, relatively little emphasis is placed on bedside medicine, a new term for an old concept: getting the necessary information […]
Coping With Work Stress in Today’s Uncertain Job Market
Everyone has experienced some level of work-related stress. Dubbed the “21st century equivalent of the Black Death, stress is the top cause of workplace sickness. While some workplace pressures can be stimulating and motivating, when they become stressful, it means you are struggling to cope. The tension and anxiety resulting from stress plays out on […]
Catherine’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Catherine, a pale thin woman in her thirties, was into her third year with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). She’d been “everywhere,” including the Mayo Clinic, but no one had been able to answer her question: why am I ill? All treatments, conventional and alternative, had given her only temporary relief before they stopped working or […]
Melanie’s PMS Hell
A smart woman in her mid forties, Melanie had written “Bad PMS” neatly on our patient intake form, and then gone on to trace the word “Bad” several times with her pen and underlined it. Until about ten years ago, the odds were stacked against women like Melanie, trying to get help from their doctors […]
C’est Moi
If I hadn’t been experiencing an annoying sensation in my throat with every swallow that in my fears had escalated to advanced throat cancer, the week would otherwise have begun quite nicely. For example, while talking to a new patient with some longstanding neck and shoulder issues, I asked if she would mind if my […]
The Evidence Is In: Inflammation Shortens Your Life
Did you ever ponder why some obese people, after decades of being badgered by their families and physicians to lose weight, out-live their thin friends and seem perfectly healthy? Or how someone in his 50s falls over dead from a massive heart attack after being told during his check-up that everything was fine, his cholesterol […]
JAMA Reports Bribing Your Doc Could Improve Care (You Might Not Want These Details)
Two separate articles appeared this week in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) reporting that financial incentives either to individual physicians or group practices might improve the overall quality of care delivered to patients. I guess it’s human nature, especially viewed through the eyes of a lifetime Chicagoan like myself, to think, “Well […]
What’s Your Risk? Breast Cancer in the News Again
I was pleasantly surprised to learn how much damage occurred at the Susan G. Komen Foundation in response to its astonishingly wrong-headed decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Women (and smart men) around the country were rightly outraged that money earmarked for the breast cancer screening of low-income women–not for family planning or […]
Diet Drug Controversies
The FDA recently approved two new weight-loss drugs and literally within hours of the drugs being officially released a pharmaceutical rep for one of the companies left his card with me and a patient called wanting a prescription. In the weeks that followed, full-page ads for the drugs began appearing in every medical journal I […]
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 […]
Death By Restaurant
Fair warning: This is one of those Don’t Shoot the Messenger health tips. Believe me, I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants over the years, but now, having read a series of articles recently published in medical journals, I’ll be doing more grocery shopping and home cooking. We all get a tremendous proportion of our […]
Four Reasons To Like Obamacare
Like everyone who works in health care, I’m both excited and nervous about what the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, will mean for both patients and practitioners. I like to view my excitement as an optimistic one, similar to the way people must have felt in the 1930s when Social Security guaranteed […]