Q: In a recent newsletter you discussed new findings in nutritional medicine. I’ve never heard of nutritional medicine. Would you define it?
Wintertime Blues: 10 Steps to Turn Them Around
The wintertime blues, also known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), usually begin when the days get shorter and the sky clouds over into perpetual gray. Many people with SAD dread late autumn because the clocks move back an hour and, in a single day, autumn twilight becomes dark night.
Nutritional Medicine News
Each week I read well over 100 medical articles, summaries, and abstracts of studies sifted from the thousands that are published. Most have nothing to do with nutritional medicine, but there are always a few. Here are some recent highlights:
An Easier Way to Overcome Psychological Problems
Periodically, a new development in natural/holistic health really lives up to its hype. This is the case with energy psychology.
Myers’ Cocktail
A lot of my readers have read about this well-known gem of nutritional medicine in one alternative medicine magazine or another and may wonder if it could be useful for their particular health issue. In my own practice, many patients receive their Myers’ regularly, returning because of positive results.
Low Thyroid and Taking Your Body Temperature
If your basal temperature (armpit temperature, taken when you awaken in the morning) is below 97.6, you might benefit from a small dose of natural thyroid replacement, usually in the range of one half grain to 1 grain daily, available by prescription, to improve your energy.
Advances in Fibromyalgia: Part 3
For fibromyalgia, there’s quite a bit you can do on your own. Some of this is old material, described in more detail in my book, The Triple Whammy Cure.
Advances in Fibromyalgia: Part 2
Doctors like me who work with many fibromyalgia (and chronic fatigue) patients try a variety of alternative approaches. These make perfect sense physiologically because they address the root cause of fibro, rather than supplying yet another painkiller (like Lyrica).
Advances in Fibromyalgia
As readers of my book The Triple Whammy Cure know, fibromyalgia is essentially a response by your body to unchecked stress, generally occurring (or returning) when your stress level exceeds the protective effect of your serotonin. You suffer that stress and your muscles tighten up and stay that way, hurting more and more. That’s fibromyalgia
Toxic Metals and Disease
Here’s an issue doctors have been arguing for decades: determining whether or not levels of certain metals (like lead and mercury) actually cause problems and then establishing scientific protocols to detoxify people.
Can You Lower Cholesterol with Supplements?
The answer, like many of my courageous medical comments, is a firm “It depends…”
Most of my patients aren’t thrilled when I reach for a prescription pad, especially when it’s for a drug they might have to take for the rest of their lives. Consider also the dollar signs that appear in the eyes of pharmaceutical industry executives if you are, say, 40 years old and your doctor writes you a Lipitor prescription to lower your bad cholesterol. If you live to be 80, over your life span you’ll be spending about $50,000 on this drug.
The Most Important Supplement
It’s magnesium. In fact, if you wake up one morning and say, “I’m not taking another supplement in my life” (not that I’m recommending this), don’t toss your magnesium.
Your Colonoscopy
Yes, yours.
If you’re under 50, you have my blessing to press the DELETE button and move on to your next message. Readers in their mid-40s might want to keep reading. Your time is coming.
SICKO Part Five: Fixing the System
First, let me explain why doctors might be so impotent when it comes to doing anything about a health care system many of them clearly see is wrong. I read a research paper some years ago by a psychologist trying to analyze why physicians allowed themselves to be manipulated into situations that were patently against everyone’s best interests, including their own.
Q&A: A Question About SICKO
Q I’ve been reading your series on Michael Moore’s movie SiCKO and was wondering: is Medicare the same as national health insurance? My mother and father are covered under Medicare and they seem to get good care from their doctor.
SICKO Part Four
Michael Moore’s SiCKO explores a seamy underside to the American health care system: the self-serving collusion between the US federal government and the immense powers within medical care.
SiCKO Part Three: More on Michael Moore’s Important Documentary
When I was in China this summer, I began a conversation with our group and our Chinese guide. We compared health care in China with that of the US. Most of my fellow travelers were Canadians, Brits, and Australians, with a few Scandinavians tossed in for good measure.
SICKO Part Two
This continues my urging for you to see (and act upon) Michael Moore’s movie SiCKO, his devastating critique of our health care crisis.
Our current health care mess really began in 1971 when President Nixon signed a law that ended further debate about government-funded universal health care. Until that point, doctors had been making good money in the now historical fee-for-service system (the only remaining fee-for-service physicians today are cosmetic surgeons). Doctors were fearful to the point of paranoia about so-called socialized medicine, and very worried about what was being created up in Canada.
SICKO Part One
Three movies in my entire life have moved me to tears, and Michael Moore’s SiCKO was one of them.
(The other two? Walt Disney’s Snow White–I was four, the witch–and at 25, Star Wars, utter boredom).
Last month I saw–twice, in fact–this devastating critique of the American health insurance industry and its collusion with the federal government. Health insurance is a very sensitive issue for me. Every hour of every day the endless confrontation of doctors and their patients with the health insurance industry increases everyone’s stress and interferes with decent medical care.
Solving Adrenal Imbalance
They’re about the size of walnuts, your two adrenal glands. Picture them there, resting comfortably, one on top of each kidney. If you reach around your back with your hands open, your thumbs will be about where your adrenal glands are perched.