Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: there are more than 100 different autoimmune conditions and they collectively cause 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 […]
Tag: lyme
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 10: The Tick Bite You Don’t Remember
You’re 11 years old. Or 16. Or 30. Like most Chicagoans, you regard Wisconsin and Michigan as places that exist to rent us cabins for fishing, swimming, and hiking in the woods. But after a weekend breathing the fresh air, you return home and find yourself feeling sick: headache, fever, achy. Also, you’ve got a […]
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 […]
Lyme Disease In Your Nervous System: Three Cases
“Why am I limiting this to only three cases?” I wondered. Physicians who treat Lyme, like our group at WholeHealth Chicago where we see a lot of Lyme disease patients, would tell you there are so many manifestations of Lyme when it invades the nervous system that I really should list as many as possible. […]
Functional Telemedicine, Wherever You Are
All things considered, we’ve rather enjoyed our telemedicine interactions with patients. Doctoring this way also recently provided me with an Aha! moment. What I realized was that much of what we do as Functional Medicine specialists, both diagnosis and treatment, can be done online with you never leaving your home. Such a consultation would include […]
Breakthroughs in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
To me, the greatest advance for the estimated 2.5 million adults, adolescents, and children with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been the slow but steady acceptance of its very existence by the conventional medical community. This has been a real uphill battle and we’re encouraged to finally see some (guarded) victories. The first description of […]
Six Beefs With Rheumatologists
If you find yourself in the waiting room of a rheumatologist, you’re likely there because your joints hurt and have been hurting, often for years. You’ve been getting by on aspirin or Advil for the pain, but with things worsening your primary care doctor suggests you should see a joint specialist, a rheumatologist. And because […]
New Hope For Sinus Sufferers
When osteopath Dr. Rob Ivker moved to Colorado in the 1980s to set up his family practice, he had no idea that when he stepped off the plane he’d succumb to symptoms of chronic sinusitis that just wouldn’t go away: stuffy nose, thick mucus, pressure behind his cheekbones and above his eyebrows, dull aching headache, […]
Chronic Lyme Disease: Best Testing, Best Treatment
Last week I suggested if you’ve been suffering longstanding but otherwise unexplained symptoms, a long-ago tick bite might be an overlooked possibility and you could now be dealing with chronic Lyme disease. I added that your recovery may well be delayed by some totally unnecessary and immature bickering among physicians about the correct name for […]
Lyme Disease: A Biological Weapon Gone Awry
Prepare yourself for a genuinely frightening Health Tip. I bought Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, by investigative reporter Kris Newby, this past Saturday at 10 am and finished it at 8 pm. It reads more like a thriller than non-fiction and is chilling in its implications. First, some background: The […]
Ozone Therapy: What It Is and How It’s Used
I’ll spare you a migraine. Don’t google “ozone therapy” as you’ll get 2.1 million results in 0.35 seconds. And while this is a mere fraction of what happens when you search for “migraine” (80 million in 1.19 seconds), just reading about the controversy over ozone therapy in first 20 entries might be enough to give […]
I Feel So Inflamed!
And among other symptoms, indeed she was. Julia, a bright 40-something, had written “fatigue,” “pain,” “bad digestion,” and “brain fog” on her WholeHealth Chicago intake paperwork. She’d been ill for years and brought with her two binders full of medical info on herself. The thicker of these contained accumulated medical records, lab tests, imaging studies, […]
Here’s What You Should Know About Lyme Disease
In H.G. Wells’s novel (and Steven Spielberg’s movie) War of the Worlds, aliens invade Earth, fully intending to destroy it. Despite our best efforts to defend ourselves, we’re clearly losing until suddenly all the aliens start dying off. Scientists later discover the aliens had no immunity to Earth’s bacteria. The evil aliens were out of their […]