It’s a question I’m asked with some regularity. Last week, when I told you about our new WholeHealth Supplement Plans for personalized monthly supplement delivery (which we started offering yesterday), I ended that Health Tip by mentioning that I swallow 18 supplements twice a day. You might have thought it weird and/or nauseating. But, hey, […]
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 […]
Menopause Hell? Quell The Fire With Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy (BHRT)
When it’s time, you can expect to transition through menopause in one of three ways. If you’re unlucky enough to land in Menopause Hell, give some serious thought to bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT). Some women experience Menopause Heaven, in which your periods start changing and then stop without drama. A year goes by without […]
Gut Restoration: Repairing Your Microbiome
At one time, conventional physicians simply did not believe in the concept of intestinal dysbiosis, in which the intestinal tract has an unhealthful mix of the 100 trillion bacteria thriving within it. This population of bacteria is called the microbiome, a word for years ignored in medical schools and barely recognized by gastroenterologists. It was […]
Is The Environment Making Us Fat(ter)?
Virtually every day, a patient offers a variation of this sentence: “I’m steadily gaining weight no matter what I do. I restrict my calories to good foods, I exercise regularly, and I get zero results. My thyroid tests are normal. What’s wrong with my body?” We know the US is a nation of the overweight […]
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 […]