Over the past eight months many things have changed for me and my family and finally, the future is looking bright again. Despite the many challenges, I’ve learned some things that aren’t taught well in medical books and I’ve reinforced some things I know intellectually, but now know first hand. I hope these lessons are useful to you if you are one of your loved ones faces the all too prevalent cancer.
American’s consumed 9.4 billion cases of soft drinks in 2009; that’s roughly 60 gallons per person annually. Mayor Bloomberg has drawn a line on consumption by pushing hard to limit the largest size sodas in New York restaurants to 16 ounces and a recent study showed sodas are linked to heart attacks. Now the American Cancer Society (ACS) is getting into the ring and making the stakes of unhealthy sugary drinks even higher. The ACS believes that the health risks of soda consumption should be viewed by US health officials in the same way that they viewed the health risks of using tobacco in the 1960s.
It was from my father that I learned some essential health tips that impact my life even today. As Father’s Day approaches, it seems a good time to share them with you.
Every day, 1 in 4 Americans visits a fast food restaurant. McDonald’s alone feeds nearly 50 million people a day, more than the population of Spain. According to a recent survey by the Technomic food research firm, although 47% of consumers want more healthy restaurant options, only 23% actually order healthy food when dining out. The reason – down deep they already know it isn’t healthy.
Painful sex not only hurts, it affects relationships and it keeps on causing a problem until it’s treated; and it’s affecting 20 million American women. That’s why every woman should…
For those of you who’ve struggled with infertility, I know how stressful it can be. Because of that, I wrote this poem about the invisible loss that occurs and want to share it with you now in honor of Infertility Awareness Week.
Infertility: The Child Who Might Have Been
Huey Lewis sang about “The Power of Love.” Now a relatively new field called interpersonal neurobiology is proving your brain is constantly in a state of being rewired based on…
Twenty years ago during a particularly stressful period of work, I began taking a yoga class as a non-pharmacologic antidote. I was running a center for reproduction and women’s health, working 24/7 and needed a way to relax. I had the good fortune to enroll with a yogini named Hari Khar Khalsa, and I took classes from her for a period of time. One day after class I asked her if she would be interested in teaching a yoga class to my patients to lower their stress. We began a series of yoga classes with the first hour consisting of us sitting on mats on the floor with my patients and discussing a health topic. I called them “Mat Chats.” The second hour was devoted to yoga with a focus on the medical topic we had just covered.
By any standards, I was a fat child. So much so that at 29 months old, I was dubbed Mighty Mite by a front page article in the Galveston Daily News. They ran the article because I was the fattest kid my age in all of Galveston County. People at the time thought “a fat baby is a healthy baby.” Now we know a fat baby often is not a healthy baby and much more likely to be a fat and unhealthy adult. In 2012, 1 in 3 children are obese. Mission Readiness, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization run by retired military leaders dedicated to investing in America’s youth, discovered that today, 27% of 17- to 24-year-olds, some 9 million, are too fat to meet the basic minimum standards required for military service because they are too fat. They fear obesity as a national security issue.
One of the most common concerns among breast cancer patients is how to deal with hot flashes. They are a huge problem that affects the quality of life for over half of women treated with endocrine treatments. In fact, hot flashes are the number one reason they think about stopping treatment. HRT is very effective but it can almost never be used due to risk. So I want to share some of the alternative treatments to HRT for you to discuss with your doctors. There are also many women who don’t have breast cancer who either can’t or don’t want to take HRT for the low estrogen symptom of hot flashes. This will help you as well.
Yes, it’s true. The cherubic faced, red clad Christmas icon has just gotten his medical clearance from his doctor and this time his sugar was a little elevated. Turns out that Santa is under a lot of stress trying to make enough toys for all the kids. And with the down economy and all the sitting at work and on his sleigh, his belly fat has finally drifted just a wee bit to far over his large black belt.
Diabetes leads to many health problems. It’s caused when a person’s blood sugar levels are too high because their body does not make or cannot use insulin to keep blood sugar (glucose) levels in the normal range. The Hgb A1C is another blood test and it tells if a persons blood sugar levels have been elevated over the past 3 months. Do you have diabetes or pre-diabetes (your blood sugar or Hgb A1C level is higher than normal but not yet abnormal enough to be diagnosed as having diabetes)? If you find that you have pre diabetes, you can get your blood sugar back to normal just by changing your lifestyle. According to the American Diabetes Association, these are the symptoms of diabetes:
When I hear Louis Armstrong sing What A Wonderful World, my body automatically relaxes. Now studies are proving it’s more than a feeling. Music can be a powerful tool to lower stress and high blood pressure. According to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), 85% of primary care visits are attributed in part to stress. So it’s pretty exciting that stress symptoms such as high blood pressure, pain and maybe even hot flashes can be improved with music.
In the United States, October 31st is a night of costumes and candy. Houses decorate for Halloween, households purchase bags of candy, and neighborhoods across America will be flooded with 41 million trick-or-treaters between ages 5 and 14 according to the US Census Bureau. Costumed children will joyously fill their coiffeurs with “Halloween gold.” Of course I’m talking about candy and at the center of the Halloween excitement is about $6.86 billion worth of purchased decorations, costumes and candy according to a 2011 survey by the National Retail Federation. The same survey estimates that the average American family spends $72.31 on these items and according to MSN Money, about 7 of 10 families will participate.
Most of my menopause patients think bioidentical estrogens are safer, more natural and better in every way than non-bioidentical estrogens. Women in book clubs and boardrooms keep hearing bioidentical estrogens have all the benefits of pharmaceutical estrogen with none of the associated risks.
But is that really true? Read on.
A number of years ago my mother had a group of calcium specks on her mammogram that turned out to be an early breast cancer. We were all very lucky.…
Hunger is no longer a third world problem. Wealthy countries are facing the fact that an ever-growing number of their citizens are food insecure. Imagine opening your refrigerator and finding it empty. Imagine opening your kitchen cabinets and having no food. Sadly, that’s the reality for 50 million United States citizens; they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That includes over 15 million children and 3 million senior citizens. In Canada, food banks are assisting more people than ever before – 867,948 in March 2010 in a country of roughly 35 million. Thirty-eight percent of these are children.