Meditation is the simplest relaxation technique to explain and by far the hardest to master.
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Symptoms: Disease or Functional?
In medical school, you’re taught that patients either have a disease or don’t: That your patient is either genuinely unwell with a name-able condition (and the positive test results affirming this diagnosis) or not.
Sea Salt Nonsense
It was the 1920s social critic H.L. Mencken who etched the phrase into American history: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Women, Baseball Bats, Men, and Serotonin
One morning a couple weeks ago, I opened the Chicago Sun-Times to see photos of two accomplished young women who’d been beaten unconscious by a man with an aluminum baseball bat. They’d both been admitted to an intensive care unit. The perps were tracked down when they used one of the victim’s credit cards to buy gas.
Food Sensitivity Elimination Diet
Purpose: To identify hidden food allergens that may be causing some or all of your symptoms. During the elimination period, all common allergens are completely eliminated from the diet for two to three weeks. After your symptoms improve, foods are added back one at a time to determine which foods provoke symptoms.
Help for Your Fading Sex Drive
In last week’s health tip, I talked about Big Pharma’s predilection for creating illnesses to fit new chemicals, and how the controversial hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) was a “perfect match” for a failed antidepressant called flibanserin.
Your Sex Drive, the FDA, and Big Pharma
Strange trio, right? But keep this health tip in mind a few months from now when you’re watching a sexually charged TV commercial for a (yet unnamed) prescription libido enhancer as your wonder “Didn’t I read about this somewhere?”
The Sadness of Happy Meals
Remember poor Morgan Spurlock, eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month in his documentary Super Size Me? As meal followed meal, lubricated with gallons of Big Gulps, he became fatter, his liver turned to a greasy mush, and he felt simply terrible. If you listened carefully to the voiceover, he also sounded fatigued…and depressed.
Soy Foods and Breast Cancer
For the past several years, the advice given to breast cancer survivors by their oncologists simply didn’t make much sense. I must have heard this from dozens of women: “I was told to avoid soy because it would make the cancer worse.” They’d been told that soy “feeds” cancer, like adding gasoline to a smoldering […]
Holiday Stress Rx: Ten Tips
December is a stressful month, especially for women and despite all the holiday cheer.
Some of you might be thinking “But he’s Jewish–what does he know about Christmas stress?” Here are my credentials: I’ve been married for many years to a Christian woman and I’ve watched as she and our extended family become fried by the stress during every holiday season. Also, my patients tell me the holidays stress them, period.
Q&A: Tanning Beds to Boost Vitamin D and Serotonin?
Click here for the original post. Q: You write a lot about how sunshine increases vitamin D and serotonin. Do you recommend using a tanning bed or booth to accomplish this? A: Short answer: No. Longer answer: You shouldn’t be using ultraviolet tanning salons for anything. A World Health Organization position paper on tanning beds […]
A SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) Time of Year
Although H1N1 along with our annual “regular flu” are rightfully grabbing the headlines these days, now that it’s October we need to brace ourselves for the annual epidemic of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
Should I get the Swine Flu Vaccine?
By now, everyone knows there are two flus this season. First, the regular seasonal flu (for which you get an annual flu shot), as always requiring a slight change in vaccine formulation to ensure it targets this year’s flu strain. The second vaccine protects against the well-publicized H1N1 virus, better known as swine flu.
The Upside of Low Serotonin
A new patient visited our center recently, writing on our intake form “need to get my serotonin higher.” She’d read The Triple Whammy Cure and felt that she’d been making progress on her own. However, she was still mildly depressed, craved carbs, and had low energy. If you’ve read my book, you all know the rest.
Learning to Say No
Click here for the Health Tip link. I have a group of chronically stressed patients who share one characteristic: their utter inability to say the word no, as in “Sorry, but no, I just don’t have time for that.” This group can be recognized by their fixed smiles, even as they’re relating stories of stress-related […]
Walking Away From Chronic Stress (and Three Useful Herbs)
Today I’m going to skip over the obvious suggestions: meditation, yoga, self hypnosis, biofeedback, relaxation recordings, and regular exercise. They’re all undeniably useful tools to alleviate the stress of your Cuisinart existence (picture yourself trying to avoid those spinning blades). I’m also going to skip over psychotherapy, another extremely good approach to chronic stress. A […]
How Stress Shortens Your Life (And What To Do About It)
Click here for the Health Tip link. If you’ve ever been curious about how your body “feels” when challenged by relentless stress, consider this experiment. Obviously, I don’t recommend you try it. Like the car ads on TV say, “Do not attempt this. A professional is driving a closed course.” I’m asking you to think […]
Second Opinions
Second Opinions
A lot of my patients recently are relating stories of having surgery that I regard as unnecessary. More charitably, these are surgical procedures whose chance for producing symptom relief is iffy at best.
Most of my fellow internists do believe that too much surgery is being performed, and that the symptoms people are hoping surgery will cure can often be handled by lifestyle changes instead.
St. John’s Wort
St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), a common shrub-like perennial, bears bright yellow flowers that contain numerous therapeutic substances when dried. Europeans have used the herb for centuries to calm jangled nerves and heal wounds, among other ills. And so it’s not surprising that North Americans have recently embraced its use as a treatment for depression and conditions associated with it.
Spirulina and Kelp
For thousands of years, traditional healers in China and other parts of the world have looked to the water for healing remedies. Spirulina and kelp were two key finds.
Spirulina is a small, single-celled microorganism that’s rich in chlorophyll, a plant pigment that gives so many lakes and ponds their dark blue-green color. Kelp, in contrast, is a brown algae that grows only in the sea. The name refers to any of the numerous long-stemmed seaweeds that belong to the order Laminariales or Fucales.