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,...
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...