I routinely ask two questions pertaining to antibiotics: how many times have you taken them in the last ____ years, encouraging people to fill in the blank. My idea of “not very often” is 20 years ago: at that frequency, perhaps an individual has re-populated their normal gut flora, if they have a hope of ever restoring normal, which is an unanswered question.
What Is Known About OsteoporosisHealthy Steps: Osteoporosis—First StepsHealthy Steps: Osteoporosis—Full ProgramPreventing OsteoporosisFrom Dr. Deborah’s Desk “It wasn’t even a bad fall, but my wrist just snapped!” The only good news in that pronouncement was that it was her wrist and not her hip. My new patient, Edith, came to see if there were natural solutions […]
What Is Known About Breast CancerHealthy Steps: Breast Cancer Prevention—First StepsHealthy Steps: Breast Cancer Prevention—Full ProgramBreast Cancer DetectionFrom Dr. Deborah’s Desk Most women aren’t thinking about breast cancer when they’re taking a shower, yet that is the moment when their whole world can change. A new hard lump sends a shock wave from the fingertips […]
How do I get to GOOD?
Here’s the million dollar question, because most large medical clinics have switched to “efficient” thyroid testing, which I would call perhaps efficient but in the long term, absolutely insufficient. Bare bones testing checks just the TSH (the messenger from the brain’s control center, turning on thyroid hormone production) with a “reflex to T4”, the free T4 only ordered if the TSH crosses a worrisome threshold, usually set too high, in my opinion. Such testing will identify “overt” hypothyroidism, namely when there is an elevated TSH and a sub-normal T4 level.
Unraveling The Modern Diseases: Autoimmune
In autoimmune disease a person’s own immune system turns on itself. Antibodies within our immune system are normally our defenses against injury (healing a cut) or intruders (viruses or bacteria) or chaos (growing cancers), but sometimes a body will make antibodies set out to attack the actual tissues of the body itself. We can identify autoimmune antibodies to tissues on simple blood tests
Inflammation is a key part of all of these problems, and the inflammation derives from over-activity in the part of the immune system that produces antibodies to tissues within the body.
No secret: people are sick more often with colds and flu during the winter. Possible reasons include loss of sunlight enriched vitamin D levels, exposure to cold and damp, indoor air quality, and greater indoor crowding. Most of these conditions are beyond individual control, but there are still things you can do for yourself to stay as healthy as possible during the winter.
I recently had a conversation with a fellow member of our local Rowing Club, I’ll call her Wanda.
You’ve probably heard alarm that our US life expectancy has gone down during the pandemic (and actually a bit before that as well), but I would suggest that one reason we were hit so hard by the pandemic is that we’ve paid little attention to our “health span”.