That box of chocolate chip cookies you never should have purchased in the first place is sitting there on your kitchen table, luring you, taunting. Your period is due in two or three days and you feel grumpy, depressed, bloated. You’re agonizing. “Just a…couple/two, three at the most” you think, knowing you’ll actually feel emotionally […]
I was at dinner with an old physician colleague of mine who happens to be French. Despite living in the Midwest for decades, he continues his lifetime subscription to Le Monde and preserves–no, cultivates–his accent so efficiently that I miss about ten percent of what he’s saying. Given we were both well into our second […]
“My hormones are out of whack!” That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients. It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less […]
It’s an interesting phenomenon that more women ask about testosterone therapy for the men in their lives than men ask for themselves. And when a man does ask, the question is usually couched with hesitations, “Uh, my…wife wanted me to…uh…ask about…you know…testosterone.” There are good reasons for hesitation. For men, the symptoms of age-related testosterone […]
I’ve lost track of the number of women who’ve told me something like this: “My mammogram experience was horrible. They called me back with this get-in-here-right-away sense of urgency. I was terrified. They took lots of pictures, talked about calcifications. I had one biopsy, then had to return for another. The suspense was horrible.” And […]
(Snarl your answer) “JUST ONE! ME! HEY, BUDDY–YOU GOT SOME SORT OF PROBLEM WITH THAT?!” Ah, PMS. Even if you don’t ever want a baby let’s see if we can fix things so you don’t have to put up with this crap for 30 years. I can write about PMS, and over the years have […]
I don’t mean to catch you mid-croissant on this topic, but I want to report the latest research on a woman’s libido and its relationship to her masturbation activities. If you’re a woman in your mid-40s or older, partnered or not, straight or gay, you may have noticed something about your sex drive you’re not […]
That box of chocolate chip cookies you never should have purchased in the first place is sitting there on your kitchen table, luring you, taunting. Your period is due in two or three days and you feel grumpy, depressed, bloated. You’re agonizing. “Just a…couple/two, three at the most” you think, knowing you’ll actually feel emotionally […]
“My hormones are out of whack!” That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients. It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less […]
New patient Phil told me he’d been suffering muscle pain every single day for more than eight years. He’d seen neurologists and rheumatologists, had had an MRI of his spine, was told he had spinal stenosis (narrowing), had cortisone shots, and recently had been scheduled for neurosurgery. Then a friend told him to stop taking […]
It’s really annoying the way the pharmaceutical industry snookered US physicians over the herbal antidepressant St. John’s wort. If only the profession had been just a little skeptical of an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a while back we might not be as up to our bellybuttons in […]
Barbara was 30 and what she’d written on her WholeHealth Chicago form certainly didn’t match her appearance. On the first line, “My hair is falling out!” And on the second, “Tired!” Physically she looked healthy, but her face reflected a worried shadow. “I know it looks like I have a lot of hair,” she began, […]
Right now, mid-December, if you happen to be sitting in a room with five of your friends, the odds are strong that one of you has seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. If you’re the one, you’re probably in your 20s or early 30s (the vulnerable years for SAD, though you can have it at any age), you know […]
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 […]
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 […]
It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned about bioidentical hormone therapy from a talk given by Christiane Northrup, MD, (author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause) at the first meeting I ever attended of the American Holistic Medical Association. By the way, the line-up of speakers included not […]
This short guide accompanies my patient-directed book Healing Fibromyalgia, which is based on my experience treating more than 1,600 fibro patients. Because of the nature of this condition, and the frequent necessity of prescription drugs, I wasn’t quite sure how to get the reader’s primary care physician involved. Virtually all fibro patients need professional expertise […]
From Healing Fibromyalgia, by David Edelberg, MD How Do I Know If I Have Fibro? Take the Quiz Even if you’ve already been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, take the quiz to gain a better understanding of fibro’s underpinnings. Because fibro is not a disease per se and offers your doctor no positive test results on which […]
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 […]
Posted 10/17/2011 “Vitamins linked to higher odds of early death in older women,” the headlines screamed last week. I finished an anxious call from my 88-year-old Aunt Hildy. Once peacefully ensconced in her Florida condo, now, after seeing a TV news report that vitamins were dangerous when used by women over 62, Hildy was eyeing […]
