About 25 years ago, when my boys started being born and getting acquainted with Chicago–and also before I became involved with alternative medicine–the oldest began to get ear infections. At the time, I was medical director of a big group of very conventional doctors and had access to some really good pediatricians. My son was prescribed antibiotics, his ear cleared up, but when the antibiotics were stopped, up popped another infection. Then, more antibiotics and later yet another infection.
Stress Less: Meditation
Meditation is the simplest relaxation technique to explain and by far the hardest to master.
Symptoms: Disease or Functional?
In medical school, you’re taught that patients either have a disease or don’t: That your patient is either genuinely unwell with a name-able condition (and the positive test results affirming this diagnosis) or not.
Money and Happiness
“Money won’t make you happy.” A boring cliché, hammered into our heads by our moms since that gleeful afternoon when we showed her our first day’s profits from the lemonade stand. We still try our best to believe it, but secretly we don’t. In our hearts we’d like–just once–to be tested with wealth.
Sea Salt Nonsense
It was the 1920s social critic H.L. Mencken who etched the phrase into American history: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
14 Food Changes to Consider
Today we’re not touching on why sweetened beverages are rotten for you and we’re not ranting against fries, Little Debbies, or that new national favorite, KFC’s Double Down. I’m hopeful you’ve put all that behind you.
How Much Exercise?
I owe the details of this health tip to Dr. Joseph S. Alpert, the physician-editor of the American Journal of Medicine. Since a subscription to this highly respectable journal is, for non-physicians, $166 a year, I’ll assume it’s not regularly thrust through your mail slot and share his article with you.
The Weather and Your Symptoms
I can always tell when there’s a major drop in barometric pressure by the number of e-mails I get from patients that begin, “I can’t believe I’m having such a terrible flare-up of my…”
Doctors and Lab Tests
When I was in pre-med (back in the Pleistocene Era, to many of you), I worked as a lab technician in a small hospital. All those blood and urine tests you’ve had whose results are now fully automated were once processed slowly and painstakingly by hand (mine among them). The so-called metabolic profile of about 20 tests that today takes a few seconds to complete would have occupied me for nearly a full workday.
Biography as Biology
I’d first come across this phrase during a lecture by psychologist and medical intuitive Carolyn Myss, PhD, at a meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association and later reading some of her books, especially Why People Don’t Heal. In it she explores the common problem of people with chronic symptoms and negative test results, delving into how these symptoms develop and what might be done to help them.
Keeping Busy is Good For You
My days, probably like many of yours, are extraordinarily busy, and they’ve been that way for decades. I start early, end late, and it does seems as if the day goes by in a finger snap. Weekends, for most of us, is catch-up time for all the stuff we couldn’t squeeze in on weekdays.
Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain
The next two weeks are the year’s most dangerous when it comes to the radius of your waist, the width of your thighs, and the heft of your chins.
As I write, it’s two degrees below zero in Chicago and I think we can safely agree most of us won’t be jogging off the extra calories we’re facing from now into the new year. Driving to the health club in a winter storm is also a bit off-putting
Why We Get Fat: It’s Official
Don’t “Ho-ho-ho” me, Santa baby, with a “Because we eat too much.” While it’s true that overeating even a healthy diet will set you in the direction of being mistaken for the Michelin woman, it’s what you’re chowing down that really counts.
Another Mystery Rash
In last week’s Case of the Mysterious Rash, a young man’s near-daily eruption of hives turned out to be triggered by a latex sensitivity he’d developed while walking the sandy beaches of Hawaii wearing rubber flip-flops.
This brings to mind another patient. Liz, too, had seen a bevy of dermatologists, none of whom could identify the culprit behind her hives. Liz knew from her internet research that the trigger is discovered in only about 60% of cases. Still, she persevered. There had to be something behind her rash, which had been coming and going for years.
The Case of the Mysterious Rash
Although dermatologists are very good at what they do–glance at a rash, make a diagnosis, and write a prescription–it has always (very mildly) irked me that they do this so quickly.
Flu Shots, Mercury, and Ideologic Medicine
I must say I was surprised by the degree of hostility I received when I recommended flu shots.
Creativity and Health
After you’ve been a doctor as long as I have, you feel entitled to make sweeping generalizations, broad observations, and the like about the patients you’ve been attempting to keep out of harm’s way as efficiently as possible.
Hormones and Breast Cancer
By noon on the day the story hit the news, I’d received a dozen emails from (sensibly) concerned patients asking what the study meant for them. First appearing in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) and then picked up by the wire services and spread around the world, the article addressed phase two of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Study that was originally published in 2002.
Franz Kafka and Health Insurance
I visited the ancient city of Prague in the Czech Republic a couple of weeks ago, where the novelist Franz Kafka, now considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, has grown into a local cultural hero.
Worst-Fear Insurance
Nursing homes, or what we now euphemistically call “long-term care facilities,” are a relatively recent phenomenon. Until about 30 years ago, great grandmothers usually existed as a shadowy presence in a family, often confused and crotchety until they became ill, took to bed, and died. Nobody thought of putting them “in a home.”