The pollen count in Atlanta Georgia on April 11 was as high as any date since 2015. Georgia has been subject to the same sort of weather that we’ve experienced here – colder and wetter than usual. The first wave of tree pollen will be triggered by the transition...
A Hypertension Solution In my last newsletter, I explained how the new American Heart Association Hypertension Guidelines will fail to reverse our growing high blood pressure problem. Milton Packer, MD, cardiologist and provocative blogger on Medpage, has labeled it...
There is a Way to Fix the Hypertension Crisis. New Guidelines Won’t Do It. In a famous psychology experiment, subjects watch a video of students, moving in circles, pass two basketballs around. The task is to count the number of passes that are made. At the end...
Predictions for this weekend are for windchills of -20 degrees in cities, -30 degrees in the suburbs. You have a significant risk of rapid hypothermic injury. Hypothermia is a nasty, subtle, and potentially fatal condition. The sequence of hypothermia is: You can get...
Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to die from heart disease than adults without diabetes. At least 68 percent of people age 65 or older with diabetes die from some form of heart disease; and 16% die of stroke. Diabetes is the seventh leading cause...
The debate about the best way to treat/prevent heart disease has become caustic. Dr. Stephen Nissen, of the Cleveland clinic, has commented “There are a lot of people out there, particularly on the web, that I’d call statin deniers, like climate deniers, who...
“Enemy of the People” In the Henrik Ibsen play “Enemy of the People.” the citizens of a small Norwegian town believe that bathing in the local mineral springs is good for one’s health. The town’s doctor discovers that the springs make people ill. The doctor, simply by...
“I love everything in the world … except for ticks.” – The Dalai Lama This summer in New England we will have significant increases in tick-borne diseases, most frequently Lyme disease. A combination of warmer winters and a very wet spring have...
The Testosterone Trials: Looking for Complications in All the Wrong Places The NIH trials of testosterone replacement in older men (The TTrials) concluded in April. Over 50,00 volunteers were screened to create a study group of 790 men. The average age was 72; many...
Finally: An Explanation of Autism I have reprinted an opinion piece from The New York Times. It traces a significant part of the autism epidemic to inflammation of the immune system. The same system that fights infection attacks the developing brain of the child...
Oatmeal for Winter 2016 – 2017 Annual Update Dr. Nadelberg and I frequently speak of mixing and matching foods to make balanced dishes. Consuming hearty foods is superior to counting calories or trying to stay on restrictive diets. Hearty foods diminish...
Sometimes that Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Train The Effect of Light at Night on Health We just experienced the longest night of the year (Winter Solstice). We shorten the night with electric light. It is the largest uncontrolled experiment in human history....
The Good In its September 2016 magazine, Consumer Reports has an extensive review of dietary supplements. They present a very good history of the supplement industry, which got its impetus from Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner, and his claims in the...
WGBH Frontline Slams Supplements There are many ongoing controversies about the use of supplements and their effects on people’s health. The supplement industry in the United States could best be described as a bazaar with various companies hawking their...
Safe Supplementation of Vitamin D This study, which recommends people to consume three times more vitamin D than the Institute recommended in 1997, also concludes that consuming more vitamin D could be hazardous. The flaw in the report is its structure which flows...
Proper Doses of Testosterone Reduces Heart Attack Risk A new Veteran’s Administration study looked at records of 83,000 men, average age 66, with no evidence of heart disease or stroke and low total testosterone (TT) at the beginning of the study. Only...
The benefits of flaxseed have been described for decades. Flaxseed has a very hard husk and contains several oils. If you eat flaxseeds whole, they will pass through undigested. In practice, the seed is crushed and the oil is harvested. Fish oil is a better source of...
