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With Summer’s Arrival, A Lyme Disease Refresher

In H.G. Wells’ novel (and Steven Spielberg’s movie) War of the Worlds, aliens from Mars invade earth, fully intending to destroy it. Earthlings are losing against the Martians until suddenly the latter start dying off. Scientists later discover the aliens had no immunity against earth’s bacteria and paid the price with their lives. With the current […]

What Having A Medical Team Actually Means

It’s quite common for a new WholeHealth Chicago patient filling out our forms to answer the “How can we help?” inquiry with “I’m seeing too many doctors and they don’t communicate with each other” or “I want all my health care in one place with one doctor who knows me.”  Having worked as part of […]

Will You Live Another Five Years?

Of course you might not want to know the answer to that. Or, having worked diligently on healthful eating and regular exercise, you may want to know if it will all pay off. Now, in a joint project between Swedish statisticians and a half million (!) volunteers in the UK, there’s a simple questionnaire that […]

Winter Without Depression: A Workshop

As the clocks roll back and the first snow falls, you pull out winter gear right along with your annual dread of the bone chilling, windy darkness of a typical Chicago winter. Walking and other outdoor activities are challenging if not impossible. Driving, parking, and waiting for public transportation are a real annoyance, and many […]

WTF Happened To My Sex Drive?

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 […]

At the Corner of Criminal and Customer: Why Would Anyone Shop At Walgreens?

Sometimes when I hand a patient a prescription she’ll ask, “Where should I get this filled?” “Pretty much anywhere except Walgreens,” I answer, “unless you actually enjoy long waits and, if you’re taking a pain med, getting a humiliating third-degree runaround from the pharmacist. Me? I wouldn’t buy a toothpick from the place.” I usually […]

We Want You To Die

It’s funny how the mind works. You find yourself in a particular situation and as you mull over what to do, all of a sudden up pops a line from a movie. Good old Freud, always reliable when it comes to mining your subconscious. The question, from the aliens-invade-earth action flick Independence Day, is posed […]

Welcome Dr. Kristen Donigan

This health tip is especially exciting for me as I have the pleasure of announcing that a new physician, Kristen Donigan, DO, has joined WholeHealth Chicago and is available for appointments. After a decade of trying to find my first physician associate, I felt blessed when Casey Kelley, MD, joined us, though I was concerned […]

What’s Your Risk? Breast Cancer in the News Again

I was pleasantly surprised to learn how much damage occurred at the Susan G. Komen Foundation in response to its astonishingly wrong-headed decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Women (and smart men) around the country were rightly outraged that money earmarked for the breast cancer screening of low-income women–not for family planning or […]

Why We Take Nutritional Supplements

I’m pretty confident that you, a reasonably regular reader of these health tips, devote a small portion of your living quarters to nutritional supplements. Your morning ritual of teeth/skin/hair/clothes likely includes some pill-swallowing, an act you regard not necessarily as pleasant, but as necessary, sort of like inserting your contacts or a tampon. Most of […]

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 […]

A Newly Discovered Cause of Women’s Fatigue

Posted 12/12/2011 Given the number of women who walk around feeling tired all the time, it’s truly unfortunate that the important piece of research we’re discussing today didn’t generate more publicity. Tucked away in the small-circulation medical journal Thyroid, whose readership is probably limited to endocrinologists specializing in thyroid disorders, there appeared an article about […]

The WholeHealth Healing Cave

The office lease describes our place as “lower level,” which any Chicagoan knows is a euphemism for basement. Some cities call these locations garden apartments, which generally means ground level, your apartment fair game for ants and burglars. We at WholeHealth Chicago are well below ground level. My partner Dr. Paul Rubin and I knew […]

Why We Get Fat: It’s Official

Don’t “Ho-ho-ho” me, Santa baby, with a “Because we eat too much.” While it’s true that overeating even a healthy diet will set you in the direction of being mistaken for the Michelin woman, it’s what you’re chowing down that really counts.

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.