The invitation looked harmless enough. One of Chicago’s largest health insurance companies was coordinating an evening meeting with physicians to discuss “the future in healthcare.” I knew this was coming. For the past few months, insurance companies had been conducting staff meetings at the larger medical groups to give physicians a reality check on their […]
Avoiding The Antibiotic Doomsday Scenario
Does anyone remember the late director Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”? A deranged US Air Force officer manages to launch a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union (now Russia). When the president calls in the Russian ambassador to apologize for this embarrassment, the […]
Medical Research: A Satisfying Drink from A Firehose
As a physician, one of the most useful aspects of the internet is the ease with which I can keep up with the latest in medicine. In medical school and throughout my training, I learned that the typical medical textbook (despite its heft) was extremely limited in scope and a full five years behind current […]
“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 […]
The Brutal Chelation Therapy Wars
So you can read this health tip without stumbling over a key word, it’s pronounced kee-LAY-shun. Genuinely Controversial with a capital “C,” chelation therapy (are you saying it correctly in your head?) is a series of 30 intravenous infusions that can legally be administered only by an MD or a DO. For performing it, they’re […]
An Occasionally Pleasant Minimum Security Prison
What three things do the following occupations have in common: teacher, nurse, secretary (now called administrative assistant), and information technologist? First, I would classify them all as helping professions. Second, based both on surveys and my own experience as a physician, they all work under conditions of stress, suffer a lot of anxiety and depression, […]
IMPORTANT POLICIES REGARDING ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS (EMR)
As you’ve probably figured out by now, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) will be bringing a lot of changes to the way health care is delivered in America. Along with additional governmental regulations comes new, advanced access and control of your personal medical information. As a patient at WholeHealth Chicago, you now have the opportunity […]
Why We Take Nutritional Supplements
I’m pretty confident that you, a reasonably regular reader of these health tips, devote a small portion of your living quarters to nutritional supplements. Your morning ritual of teeth/skin/hair/clothes likely includes some pill-swallowing, an act you regard not necessarily as pleasant, but as necessary, sort of like inserting your contacts or a tampon. Most of […]
A Blizzard, A French Restaurant, and the Future of Healthcare
Posted 03/11//2013 If you’d been one of the handful of pedestrians walking down Chicago’s Halsted Street during our snowstorm a couple weeks ago, you might have glanced into the window of an otherwise deserted French restaurant, your attention held for a moment by a pair of geezers engaged in extremely animated conversation in the warm […]
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 […]
Your Walking Pace, Thighs, and Longevity
I’m sure you shared my sense of relief when you read earlier this year that being a tad overweight actually was a positive in terms of lifespan. Not obese by any means, but a little chunky–husky if you will–was just fine. Researchers analyzed thousands of moderately overweight people and concluded that their all-cause mortality was […]
Amateur Night In The Emergency Room
Please read the important announcement about our acupuncturist Mari Stecker at the end of today’s Health Tip Let me pass on a tale of woe a new patient recently shared. There’s a useful lesson in health care within, and while I wouldn’t classify the event as malpractice (since no permanent damage occurred), it’s the story […]
Yoga: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
In the 1990s, when it dawned on the medical profession that their patients were flocking in droves to alternative medicine, yoga classes were generally deemed acceptable to otherwise highly skeptical doctors. Especially compared to virtually anything else “alternative.” As someone personally in the thick of things, I observed the predictable rancor and opposition to chiropractic, […]
How I Exercise
With a title like that, I fully understand if you have an urge to hit the delete key. You endured a health tip a few weeks ago about my colonic, and I do applaud your strength for that. But now, having read in this week’s American Medical News that the US is the unhealthiest among […]
A Bit of Chicago Medical History: Naprapathy
In what was probably a self-referential moment, Saul Bellow, Chicago’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, once remarked that Chicagoans rarely acknowledge their heroes. Well today I bring you a new candidate. Beyond a small circle of naprapathic physicians, it’s unlikely many of us have ever heard of Dr. Oakley Smith, who, as a young chiropractor in […]
Using Glandular Therapies
Given the comments on our blog following last week’s post on glandular therapies, let me say first that if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, glandular therapies are definitely not for you. But if you’re a veggie or vegan needing digestive enzymes, there are plenty of plant-based products. You’ll also face no compromise if you need […]
Glandular Therapy Back in the News
I’ve always been intrigued by glandular therapies, in which dried animal endocrine gland is used to treat a variety of medical conditions. And while I appreciate their medical benefits (like everything, some work better than others), even more interesting is their role in the history of medicine over the past century. Just when I thought […]
My Colonic
I know. You’re thinking, “Do I really need to read about Dr. E’s colonic irrigation this morning, sitting here with my latte and bran muffin?” Well, I haven’t written anything about colonics for quite awhile, but recently I learned the Illinois Division of Professional Regulation (DPR) wants to close the offices of the dozen or […]
Digital Excess and Cognitive Decline
Try this experiment. Sit somewhere unobserved, like a Starbuck’s or a doctor’s waiting room, and just watch people. If you see someone sitting alone, likely she’ll be checking her smart phone or laptop or plugging into music. People sitting in groups of two or more will interrupt themselves to glance at their phones, text-checking. If […]
Alternative Medicine and Cancer
Right up front, let me say if alternative medicine therapies could cure cancer they wouldn’t be alternative. Conspiracy theory alert: there is no plot on the part of oncologists, radiation therapists, pharmaceutical companies, et al. to keep lifesaving alternative therapies just beyond your reach so they can control your lives (and pocketbooks). If the mainstream […]