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 […]
Mayo Clinic’s Stunning Vitamin D Research
I’m not suggesting you spend a weekend (as I did) reading the historically important and game-changing 30-page article in this month’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings entitled “Vitamin D for Health: A Global Perspective.” The study’s authors have written an exhaustive meta-analysis, which means that although they didn’t perform any original research themselves they reviewed the research […]
Hidden Food Sensitivities
Let me begin this case study health tip with some related background. Girding their corporate loins for the arrival of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the health insurance industry has taken some predictable steps to prepare for 35 million new enrollees, many of whom, having had no health care most of their lives, are probably […]
Acupuncture
My husband and I were on an emotional roller coaster ride trying to get pregnant with our second child. I had four unsuccessful rounds of IVF treatments. During my consultation with a new physician, acupuncture was discussed. I knew very little about acupuncture, but was willing to try anything. I had acupuncture treatments starting a […]
Primary Care
Dr.Donigan is the best doctor that I have ever had. I am 65, have hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and achy joints, etc.. She listens, closely, to my concerns, and prescribed medicine, vitamins, and supplements, which, over time, have helped me feel, so, much better. She is, always, going to seminars, to learn, more, on how […]
Making Yourself Smarter
Maybe “smarter” isn’t the right word. We think of a smart kid as mentally alert, a quick learner with a good memory. But smart, as any parent of one will tell you, is a far cry from wise or insightful. As we progress from childhood, we do get actually smarter. Researchers tell us that at […]
How To Make Your Child Smarter
I was at the magazine rack at my local health club, about to grab something from among the tattered copies of Self, Men’s Health, Bazaar, and Modern Bride, when I discovered, peeping from behind its fellows, a pristine and virtually unread copy of Perspectives on Psychological Science, subtitled “A Journal of the Association for Psychological […]
A Marathon in Russia
I’ve been on vacation, traveling the back roads of Russia (which looks a lot like central Illinois) visiting ancient cathedrals and doing a great deal of walking. The trip was organized by a company I’ve been using for years, G Adventures, which brings together a small group (never more than 15 or so) of like-minded […]