Scientists have a bad habit of contradicting themselves or at least contradicting long held dogmas. This time aspirin stock took a bit hit with the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on an almost 5 year long study regarding benefits of aspirin usage in other healthy individuals. Despite a solid history of medical dogma that…
Molds come in all kinds of varieties: Toxic, allergenic, infectious, some affecting only some animals, some only causing certain organ effects, others causing little harm outside their mold neighbors. Their greatest variety of tricks probably come in terms of their different toxins, each with some of the oddest names. You have your trichothenes, your fumosinins,…
If you have been following my blog for any length of time, you know that I appreciate the sacrifice that mice and rats make for science. In this case, researchers created heart attacks in rats and monitored them for depression with or without estrogen. They found that female rats who had their ovaries removed experienced…
Sports Drinks And Breast Cancer Sometimes the weirdest discoveries pop up on my news feed. In this case researchers found that a common dietary supplement called cyclocreatine could inhibit the growth of drug resistant HER2-positive breast cancer tumors in mice. These human tumors had been grafted onto the mice for testing of therapies against their…
Suffering. It’s a big topic. It’s also a topic with which we are all too familiar. Sometimes the suffering is acute and purposeful. Sometimes it is prolonged and seemingly meaningless. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. No matter. It is suffering. After my fifth child was born, I remember pondering the topic of suffering.…
Hormone Cascade Where do hormones come from? Do they just appear out of thin air? Do they just ooze out of reproductive organs magically? No, just like most of our body’s chemical messengers, they are made from other substances in us. Our reproductive and adrenal hormones all begin as cholesterol, yes cholesterol. Despite its horrible reputation (not entirely deserved), cholesterol…
In searching for answers, others choose blood tests that guide the selection of foods to eliminate. We use a panel that includes both IgG and IgE antibodies. Normally, IgG deals with body invaders like viruses and bacteria. On the other hand, IgE interacts with allergens and parasites in our immune defense system. For some, the…
We have grown accustomed to debating conventional medicine over a variety of topics, but this one is even debated within the functional medicine world. So many patients want to know if a food is causing their symptoms. They ask, “How do I know which food it is?” Conventional medicine either doubts the possibility or refers…
How many times have I said “LDL – Bad, HDL – Good” to my patients? Thousands of times over the past years of practice, I have described the differing effects of LDL and HDL on cardiovascular health, yet researchers want to overturn this dogma, this law of medicine. Once again, little in medicine stands so…
A major study looking at how our brains age was just released. The Amen Clinics, Google, John Hopkins, UCLA and UCSF collaborated to look at what factors contributed to accelerated aging in humans. Using SPECT scans they evaluated over 100 brain areas in over 60,000 people and compared individuals with different characteristics to estimate how…