The Curious Legend of Dr. von Basch
The next time you’re in a doctor’s office and someone wraps a cuff around your arm to check your blood pressure, you’ll have to give thanks to a nice Jewish…
Get Up and Boogie, Behavioral Activation
Here’s a parlor game for psychologists and the rest of us. Try to pick a popular song that captures the essence of a given type of therapy.
Help for Old Married Couples
Not uncommonly, one member of a couple will see me in the office with a concern about the sexual aspects of their relationship.
Lacerations, Rambo Style
Deep in the jungles of southeast Asia, Rambo comes face to face with an Indochinese Tiger.
Pneumonia Vaccines
In the olden days, and by “olden” I mean last year, vaccinating patients against pneumonia was simple—we gave everyone one shot at age 65…
Quantum Entanglement
Phenomenon of quantum entanglement. It was introduced to me during my undergraduate days at UCLA in classes in physics and physical chemistry. I, along with scores of other people, have been mulling over the disturbing consequences ever since. If quantum physics were...
Stop Drinking All That Water
Of all the silly urban legends ... this one seems particularly difficult to kill off. You do not need to drink eight glasses of water per day. You do not need to drink more water than what your normal thirst would dictate. The thirst mechanism has been subject to a...
Super Bugs
"What is a super bug and how do you ..." make one? The term “super bug” always reminds me of the 1972 Black exploitation film Super Fly, starring Ron O’Neil. The movie’s trailer featured the tagline, “He’s got a plan to stick it to the man!” Back then, there weren’t...
The End of Fasting Labs
For the past ten years, patients in the practice ... have had to starve themselves for eight to twelve hours prior to coming in to the office for annual labs. But does this make any sense? As patients know, I urge plenty of skepticism when it comes to recommendations...
The Expanding Spectrum of Bipolar Disorder
In the old days, circa 1990, there were three ... main disorders of mood: anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder (also called manic-depressive illness). Bipolar disorder was the most exciting of the three. A patient might rip off his clothes and run naked through...
Vaginismus
Wow, this is an embarrassing article to ... write. Oh, I don’t mean that writing an article on the human vagina is embarrassing. After all, as a physician, I deal with this organ and its associated diseases on a regular basis. No, the article is embarrassing to write...
When Shyness Needs Treatment
If you were to describe yourself as ... “painfully shy,” probably the last job you’d want is going on national TV every night, telling jokes and interviewing people you don’t know. But such is the case for David Letterman. Other famous people, brilliant on stage but...
Why Don’t Antibiotics Kill Viruses?
When I was a kid... one of my favorite rides at Disneyland (other than the Matterhorn) was Monsanto’s Adventures Thru Inner Space. In it, you boarded a vehicle which pretended to gradually shrink you down to the size of molecules. I’m not the only one who remembers it...
Weakened Immunity and the Common Cold
“Doctor, my immune system is so weak... I’ve caught every cold and flu this year. I’ve been sick constantly for three months and I can’t get well. Can you work up my immunity? Is there anything I can take to protect me against all these infections?” Every winter, I...
Vitamin D – The Sunshine Vitamin
To understand vitamin D, we must ... first figure out what a vitamin is, and that will take us to the secret la-BOR-atory of mad scientist, Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist who in 1912 screamed, “Igor, I’ve found it!” when he realized why people who ate brown rice...
The Trouble with Mary Jane
I’m a huge fan of marijuana and here’s why... Jokes about smoking pot are really funny. Movies with stoners in them are even funnier. Sure, you wouldn’t want your daughter to date one, but when a slow-moving, laconic, glassy-eyed, long-haired, character pops up on the...
Tennis Elbow and Other Maladies
For over one hundred years, doctors and patients ... have used the term tendonitis to indicate pain in or near a tendon. Tennis elbow, jumper’s knee, and pain in the tendons of the shoulder, wrist, and heel are examples of this common problem. Recent research has led...
Shingles
We’ve all seen the horror movie where ... we think the bad guy has been killed off, but he is really hiding in the basement ready to attack the girls at the sorority as soon as the cops wrap things up and head home. This is just how shingles works. Shingles is a skin...
Mental Health in Primary Care
Recently, I had lunch with a psychiatry colleague who is setting up a new group practice near Lake Union.
Mediterranean Diet Update
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed a 30% reduction in the risk of stroke and heart attack among patients following a Mediterranean diet…
Heartbreak Hotel: Measles
In 1955 just one artist, Elvis Presley ... had five of the Billboard top 15 songs, including top of the chart “Heartbreak Hotel.” Better yet, 1955 was the beginning of the end for measles in the United States. That year, 3–4 million people, mostly children, developed...
Know Thy Enemy
The immune system is one of the most ... extraordinary feats of Darwinian engineering on the planet. Over the past four billion years as life developed from single-celled organisms to complex multicellular creatures, we have been under continual attack by viruses,...
Things That Go Thunk in the Night
Has this ever happened to you? ... You’re lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, when you feel a sudden thunk in your chest. Maybe you sense that your heart is skipping a beat and then giving you a little kick afterwards. This could happen on and off for minutes....
Genomic Medicine: Health Care in the 22nd Century
Every living organism is built from a design ... which is coded in genes. All cells in the human body, except red blood cells, contain a nucleus which holds the genetic information necessary to make a completely new human being. In Sleeper, Woody Allen and Diane...
Benign Positional Vertigo
Vertigo means dizziness—actually a specific ... kind of dizziness where you think the room is spinning or moving, as opposed to feeling unsteady on your feet with reasonably stable surroundings. Any child who has experimented with spinning around like a top knows the...
Bronchitis
Of all the diseases I commonly see in primary care ... none is more likely to be improperly treated than bronchitis. What is bronchitis and why do physicians and patients often approach this disease incorrectly? Bronchitis is divided into two versions. Acute...
BIG PHARMA in the Garden of Good and Evil
The entire world spends about $1.4 trillion every ... year on research and development in all branches of science and among all industries. Drug companies and medical device manufacturers account for 10% of the total at around $150 billion dollars. The big...
Cancer, Reconsidered
In 1971 when Richard Nixon launched our nation ... into a war on cancer, little did we realize that this war would have significant collateral damage. Although we have made progress against certain types of tumors, the part of the battle that involves wide-spread...
Throw Out Your Vitamins and Supplements
Americans spend $14 billion ... each year on vitamins and supplements. Do these chemicals provide health benefits to us, or is the entire thing mostly a scam? The answer is that it is mostly a scam. With few exceptions, the best science demonstrates that virtually all...
Ebola Virus: When Bad Things Happen to Good Blood Vessels
Imagine that every pipe in your house started leaking... Not too good for the house. A similar process is what kills the victims of Ebola virus. Ebola is one member of a family of incredibly nasty viruses called viral hemorrhagic fevers, which includes hantavirus...
Anemia: When Red Blood Cells go Missing
If you are a one-celled animal, life is pretty simple ... Your entire body is in contact with the environment at all times. You can grab oxygen and nutrients at will. It is sort of like being accidentally locked in Albertson’s overnight. Face it, you’re not exactly...
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