The new movie “Elysium” is set in Los Angeles, 2154 AD, nearly 150 years into the future. The city is utterly unrecognizable, the world in chaos–over-populated and crime-ridden, destroyed by wars, pollution, and serial economic catastrophes. Most everyone is brown-skinned, speaks an interesting Spanglish, and struggles in a subsistence existence, half starved, chronically diseased, living […]
Category: Healthy Lifestyle
Death By Restaurant
Fair warning: This is one of those Don’t Shoot the Messenger health tips. Believe me, I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants over the years, but now, having read a series of articles recently published in medical journals, I’ll be doing more grocery shopping and home cooking. We all get a tremendous proportion of our […]
Making Yourself Smarter
Maybe “smarter” isn’t the right word. We think of a smart kid as mentally alert, a quick learner with a good memory. But smart, as any parent of one will tell you, is a far cry from wise or insightful. As we progress from childhood, we do get actually smarter. Researchers tell us that at […]
How To Make Your Child Smarter
I was at the magazine rack at my local health club, about to grab something from among the tattered copies of Self, Men’s Health, Bazaar, and Modern Bride, when I discovered, peeping from behind its fellows, a pristine and virtually unread copy of Perspectives on Psychological Science, subtitled “A Journal of the Association for Psychological […]
Do I Really Need A Check-Up?
Posted 06/24/2013 You’d never guess this would be a hotly debated topic among physicians, since an affirmative answer seems so obvious. As for patients, assuming you have insurance, a doctor, and nothing’s really wrong with you, you still might like someone to look things over and ensure nothing’s amiss, no evil lurking inside that will […]
Do Vegetarians Live Longer?
A recent article in JAMA Internal Medicine would certainly make it appear that way. Researchers from Loma Linda University recruited more than 73,000 Seventh Day Adventists (the university is an Adventist-affiliated school) and asked detailed questions about dietary and other lifestyle habits, including tobacco and alcohol use, degree of exercise, income, and education level. Enrollees were divided into non-vegetarians and vegetarians. Then the vegetarians were subdivided into vegans (no […]
Health News Roundup
I have a wire basket on my desk stacked with medical articles that merit my muttering, “This is useful. Might be handy for a future health tip.” On the plus side, they’re all undeniably of interest. On the minus, there’s not enough material in each article to merit a complete health tip. So this week […]
Value Your Privacy? Avoid Walgreens Pharmacy
One evening a couple of weeks ago while at a movie I felt my cell phone vibrate. This was unusual, since virtually all my patients correspond via my often-checked e-mail. The caller ID was unknown to me, and was not that of my answering service. I would have waited 15 minutes until the movie ended, […]
Avoiding The Antibiotic Doomsday Scenario
Does anyone remember the late director Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”? A deranged US Air Force officer manages to launch a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union (now Russia). When the president calls in the Russian ambassador to apologize for this embarrassment, the […]
How To Make Your Child Smarter
I was at the magazine rack at my local health club, about to grab something from among the tattered copies of Self, Men’s Health, Bazaar, and Modern Bride, when I discovered, peeping from behind its fellows, a pristine and virtually unread copy of Perspectives on Psychological Science, subtitled “A Journal of the Association for Psychological […]
All Hail The Bean!
What a pleasant surprise to open this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine and find the results of a trial on the benefits of eating legumes–beans, lentils, and chickpeas. This was a real clinical trial, working with a group of people who had mild Type 2 diabetes. During the three-month study period, half the enrollees ate […]
Helmet-Free Biking (Sometimes)
Chicago is in the process of selecting where to locate some 300 racks for its new bike-sharing program, delayed until Spring 2013 by politics (which will come as no surprise to any true Chicagoan). Modeled after similar programs in Canada and Europe, the bike-share program is simple. The racks are stocked with rental bikes. Swipe […]
Why A Wellness Check Won’t Keep You Well
For many years, you couldn’t use your health insurance for a check-up. The attitude of health insurance companies was essentially that they were available when you got sick, period. But if you were just fine? “Don’t call us.” To make their point especially clear, if you did visit your doctor for a check-up and she […]
You, the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay
Back in the 19th century, the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote the cheerful poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.” The poem tells of a deacon who wanted to build a perfect shay, a popular two-wheeled carriage drawn by a horse, one that would last 100 years. He did so, […]
A Good Night’s Sleep
You may have discovered as you travel this weary road of life that you’re not sleeping quite as well as you did as when you were younger. Gone are the glory days when you fell asleep listening to a bedtime story and then, suddenly, it’s morning! What happened? “Why,” you ask (and probably too often), […]
The Two-Bag Syndrome
During my training as a physician, and there’s no reason to believe this has appreciably changed for young doctors now, I was taught that if you saw a patient in your office for a medical problem of any sort she’d leave dissatisfied if she didn’t receive a prescription. “Reaching for your prescription pad,” the professor […]
Functional Medicine Diagnosis and Treatment: Be Your Own Doctor
Posted 08/12/2012 Several previous health tips have mentioned the phrase “functional medicine” and I have a sneaking suspicion that many readers aren’t quite sure what it is, how it works, or how it differs from the conventional treatment you’ve likely been receiving all your life. Today, walk alongside me and try your hand at diagnosing […]
A Final Commonly Missed Diagnosis: Functional Symptoms
This missed diagnosis is a bit more complicated. It’s not one specific condition, like a slightly underactive thyroid or gluten intolerance. It’s about you and your doctor’s tunnel vision, the “if your only tool is a hammer, then everything around you is a nail” sort of thinking. Functional symptoms constitute a huge spectrum of missed […]
A Paradigm Shift
Brace yourselves. Wear comfortable shoes. Like it or not, you’re about to participate in a paradigm shift in health care. A two-page article tucked into last week’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reporting on the results of physician surveys about the Affordable Care Act reflects a genuine paradigm shift. First, let’s clarify the […]
Hospitals, Health Spas, and Feeling Great
Posted 04/16/2012 Here’s a good general rule for the rest of your life: all things considered, you’re better off avoiding hospitals and instead, every year or so, checking yourself into a resort/health spa for a few days. Personally, I don’t care much for hospitals. Whenever one of my patients ends up in one (fortunately a […]