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Dear Dr Mercola: Please Stop

As some of you know, Dr. Joseph Mercola, multi-millionaire osteopath entrepreneur of mercola.com, began his practice in the Chicago area. Sometime in the early 1990s, he and I crossed paths at alternative medical meetings and I remember just one exchange. JM: “The future is on the internet.” Me: “What’s that?” JM: “Don’t you know what […]

Introducing Our New WholeHealth Supplement Plans

If you’re a WholeHealth Chicago patient, you’ve likely noticed that we review your list of nutritional supplements during each appointment. Conventional doctors ask what prescription meds you’re taking (and of course we do too), but virtually never solicit a list of supplements. Since our area of expertise lies precisely there, it’s important for us to […]

Exciting News About Early Cancer Detection

When you cross over into your 50s and beyond, like it or not your risk for developing cancer increases. If you’re health-conscious, you try to schedule the recommended screening tests: mammogram, Pap smear, skin check, colonoscopy or Cologuard, and lung CT scan for smokers. More indirect cancer screenings include your physician noticing abrupt changes in […]

Intravenous NAD+ and Your Telomeres

In recent weeks, there’s been a noticeable upsurge of interest in the anti-aging therapies we offer at WholeHealth Chicago. Maybe it has something to do with pandemic year 2020. Now that we’re vaccinated and peeking our heads out from our hidey-holes, emerging from darkness into light, we sense we’ve lost a year. Since we can’t […]

How To Slow Aging and Track Your Results

Most people figure they must be getting older based on how they feel and look. We wince at our first grey hair, deepening wrinkles, and shifting body fat. We huff and puff climbing the stairs, forget names, and occasionally leak fluids. We relate to the line from a Leonard Cohen song, “I ache in the […]

Anti-Aging Peptide Therapy

Ask ten people to define peptide therapy and it’s doubtful you’ll get a coherent response. Search for it online and you’ll be overwhelmed by information and likely put off by claims that sound too good to be true (“Burn fat! Combat mental decline!). Let’s face it, we’d all like to enhance fat burning, slow aging, […]

My Favorite Supplement: Magnesium

Along with most things relating to good nutrition, I wasn’t taught much of anything about supplemental magnesium either in medical school or during my internal medicine residency. It was a professional clinical nutritionist I met during a long-ago meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association who first told me, “You’ll never go wrong if you […]

Commonly Missed Diagnoses: Covid-19 (Covid? RU Serious?)

Leslie, a teacher in her mid-30s, made her appointment with WholeHealth Chicago at the suggestion of her primary care physician, who knows we see a lot of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. He’d ordered myriad tests, including, of course, one for Covid antibodies. Leslie had begun feeling poorly in the middle of 2020, […]

Commonly Missed Diagnoses: Parasites

If internet scare tactics from companies selling herbal supplements for parasites aren’t enough, the show “Monsters Inside Me” with its toe-curling film clips clinches it. With this show, we’re in alien-versus-predator mode, though you might ask which one is us and which them. Those really large parasites you see wriggling across your flat screen as […]

Commonly Overlooked Diagnoses: The Subtleties of PMS

Several women’s health websites place the number of symptoms attributable to premenstrual syndrome (PMS) at 150. I personally think that’s an undercount. I really began to appreciate this some years ago when a young woman came to see me with recurring hives. Out of the blue, she’d awaken from sleep covered in large red itchy […]

Commonly Missed Diagnosis: The Three Faces of Lyme Disease 

It’s springtime and will soon be nice and warm. We’re so thoroughly tired of being trapped inside that a woodland romp sounds perfectly delightful. But please remember that ticks are lurking. They can latch onto your ankles and fall into your hair and when they bite (which you won’t even feel), they’ll attach themselves and empty their gastrointestinal tract into your bloodstream. Ticks are a cesspool […]

Commonly Missed Diagnosis: Early Autoimmune Disease

Amazingly enough, there are more than 100 different autoimmune conditions, which collectively are responsible for more chronic illness and disability in women than heart disease and cancer combined. Men can get autoimmune diseases too, but the predominance in women (2:1) is striking and also puzzling, though current thinking attributes this susceptibility to a combination of […]

Six Commonly Missed Diagnoses: B12 Deficiency

You’re pretty sure you know your body and you tell your doctor you’re just not feeling right. You’re tired, maybe a little depressed, a bit achy. Maybe your digestion is “off.” The list of foods you can’t seem to enjoy is definitely longer. Your doctor’s empathic, not at all dismissive of your symptoms, but after […]

What is Low-Dose Naltrexone (LDN) and Can It Help Me?

Ten years ago April marks the anniversary of the first time I wrote about low-dose naltrexone (LDN). I described it as an orphan drug, meaning that its patent had long ago expired, that it was generic, and that it was not owned by any one company. For these reasons and because they’d never recoup their […]

Can’t Get Vaccinated? Here’s Why

Once a week, the Chicago Sun-Times asks random people “How hard have you found it to get a Covid-19 vaccination?” and devotes a page to the responses. Virtually every answer is a variation of “I’ve tried to sign up on all the websites every day at all times of day and night and appointments are […]

Getting The Lead Out (And A Further Word About Immunization)

I’ll bet you didn’t know that Chicago has by far the worst problem with lead exposure in the entire US. It’s now estimated that fully 80% of our underground pipes are lined with lead. This means we’re all exposed to potentially toxic lead levels and the accompanying health risks. You’ll recall from last week’s Health […]

No Safe Level: Lead Poisoning and Your Health

I prefer the term “poisoning” over “toxicity” as there is no acceptably safe level of lead in the human body, just as there is no acceptable level of cyanide or strychnine. Low levels of lead won’t kill you with the swiftness of cyanide, but they will surely damage your health and, critically, that of your […]

Covid Immunization: Facts, Not Fiction

If you don’t feel like reading one more word about Covid-19, you’ve got my sympathy. However, if you’re inclined, scan this Health Tip and perhaps pick up a fact or two you didn’t know. Want to jump to my take-away? It’s this: When the vaccine is available to you, take it and thank your lucky […]

“I Am So Bloated!”

Susan wrote this on our WholeHealth Chicago form in the section marked “What’s the main problem?” She went on to tell me she’d been suffering for years, her stomach feeling like some gremlin was inflating a balloon every time she ate. When the bloating was especially severe, she said she looked like she was in […]

Major Breakthrough: A Highly Accurate Blood Test For Fibromyalgia

Although I’ve taken care of well over 2,000 fibromyalgia patients since first opening WholeHealth Chicago in 1995 (and also written a successful book on the subject), I was always troubled by two questions. First, exactly what is fibromyalgia? How can there be a condition that’s severe enough to be disabling, manifesting as widespread muscle pain, […]