“Exhaustion is my reality. At four o’clock, I’m wiped, totally wiped.” Patricia is 33, happily married as far as marriages go, one kid, steadily employed in the usual American less-than-satisfying corporate job, good eating habits, and, until recently, a health club goer a couple/three times a week. Now she’s too tired for that. Just looking […]
Earlier this year, iconic folk singer Joni Mitchell was found unconscious in her California home and immediately hospitalized. Although she was subsequently discharged and seems to be doing well (in late June her spokesperson said she’d experienced an aneurysm), the hospitalization revealed that she’d been plagued for years with Morgellons Disease. She describes her experience […]
In certain cultures, like middle class Jews growing up in Hyde Park in the 1950s, everyone remembers being chased through their home by a well-meaning mom armed with an enema bag. “Dr. Nachman said you needed this for a poopy!” I am tearful, dressed only in whity-tighties until caught in the steel grip of my […]
If you read much about health, you know about controversial diagnoses. The list might start with candida overgrowth, food sensitivities, and toxic mold syndrome and end with adrenal fatigue, heavy metal toxicity, chronic Lyme, and multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. Because controversial conditions aren’t routinely covered in medical textbooks, they can easily fly under the radar […]
I think black mold makes us nervous because we can see it, clinging to the bottom of the shower curtain, lurking in the corners of the recently flooded basement. You almost expect it to throb or make a vaguely humming noise. However, far more dangerous as a home hazard is the radioactive gas radon, but […]
The canary in the coal mine had its literal origins in the mining industry. In order to test for toxic gases, miners would lower a caged canary into a mine shaft. Bringing up a dead songbird meant humans wouldn’t be descending that shaft. The metaphor remains apt because, even today, some of us are the […]
The following is an excerpt from Dr. Edelberg’s book, Healing Fibromyalgia. In the “How Can We Help?” section of our WholeHealth Chicago Patient Questionnaire, Nicole had written “I’m in constant pain as long as I can remember and I’m so tired I can’t even think straight.” Even as I welcomed her to our center, I […]
Right up there with pain, the second most common symptom of fibromyalgia is a constant sense of profound exhaustion. Disability insurance companies, people who don’t have fibro, and (sadly) most doctors can’t appreciate the extraordinary degree of this fatigue.
For years doctors were taught in medical school that gluten sensitivity and its severest form, celiac disease, were rare, identified mainly in children who were unable to absorb food. In photographs, youngsters with celiac disease looked like starving children because in fact they were starving, for nutrients. Once the diagnosis had been made and they’d been taken off all gluten grains–wheat, barley, rye, oats, kamut, and triticale–they rapidly regained weight and lived normal lives.