A healthcare system is effective only when it offers you what you need. When you need it. For a reasonable fee.

This was the genesis of this blog. All of my patients need great data on changing their lifestyle to decrease their risk of acute and chronic disease. They want to feel better, lighter, and faster everyday and look forward to future with less risk of heart disease and cancer. I have only about an hour of your time each year, and much of that hour is consumed with procedures and documentation. On the way home from my office, you will pass a half dozen fast food joints going in any direction. Or you can just grab a cheeseburger and fries at the hospital cafeteria before you go home.

It’s hard for me to get any real work done, in that little tiny hour once a year, while I’m preparing lab slips and mammogram order sheets. We live in a toxic food environment. It’s a long time between office visits. My influence, while powerful, is getting drowned out in the daily buzz.

This blog allows you and anyone on this planet who wants great data on nutrition and health to access that information anytime. In the comfort of your home. With your family first thing in the morning. At the lunch hour at work. Over a tearful cheescake binge in the middle of the night, alone in the kitchen, while everyone sleeps. It’s here for you anytime, anywhere that internet can be accessed, and it’s free. Always will be. Our healthcare industry is great at offering you acute care in times of trauma and scheduled care for chronic disease for a hefty price, but we are lousy at providing good preventative care. I’d like to change that with this here little ‘ole blog.

The other thing we are lousy at is providing hope. Your health, and your children’s health, is held in your own two hands. You tell your DNA how to replicate, and by methylation and hydroxylation of the strands, epigenetics create diabetes and heart disease. Healthy relationships, good sleep, and great nutrition allow people to flourish in health and strength. While terrible things happen everyday, science has proven that lifestyle contributes to virtually 100% of heart attacks and at least 50% of all cancers. Imagine what good choices can do for simple things, like diabetes and hypercholesterolemia. If you want to get healthy and stay healthy, you can. If you want to avoid terrible diseases, you can reduce your risks for those diseases. Genetics plays only a small part in disease. You determine your destiny.

So you are here, which is the right place at the right time, for you to receive some good health information. Have fun browsing around and reading old blogs.

I hope you like the price too.

Maybe you have a companion animal – a dog, a cat, a gecko, a bird – that you love as much as I love my little Yorkipoo, Meeks. I especially like when he curls up on my lap at the office while I’m seeing patients. Even if you don’t have a dog, I think you will pity the companion animals that are seized from dog pounds by animal brokers for use in medical research.

The practice is known as pound seizure, where dogs and other animals are obtained from pounds and shelters by Class B animal dealers and used in research. Recently, researchers studying heart failure affiliated with Wayne State University purchased a dalmation named Queenie from a dealer in Detroit. While there are some similarities between human and dog physiology, of course a dog’s ability to communicate pain and fear are limited.

Continue reading Help End Animal Suffering in Medical Research

Cancer screening and prevention recommendations have been undergoing an overhaul lately, most recently with the new recommendations of starting mammograms at age 50, biannually, instead of annually at age 40. After decades in which cancer screening was promoted as unmitigated good, and perhaps the only way for people to protect themselves from the ravages of this horrible disease, scientists are asking us to consider a paradigm shift.

Screening comes with harms as well as benefits. When a mammogram identifies an abnormality, most women want to remove the lesion, thinking it is better to be safe than sorry. Did you know that previous breast biopsy is an independent risk factor for the development of future cancer? In this way, screening tests that identify benign lesions, resulting in unnecessary surgery for the patient, actually increase the risk for future breast cancer.

In part, we are stuck in a cancer time warp. Cancer was defined in 1845 as an uncontrolled growth that spreads and kills by Rudolf Virchow, a German scientist, who looked at tumors taken at autopsy. Unfortunately, he was only looking at cancers that killed. He never saw the others, that grow slowly, stop growing altogether, or regress and never need treatment.

“We are going from an 1845 definition of cancer to a 21st century definition of cancer”, says Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “We need to be more cautious in our advocacy of these screening tests.”