Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, and Happy New Year to all of our patients.
I will be taking the next few weeks off of writing this blog (don’t worry – I’ll still be in the office seeing patients on a limited holiday schedule, and of course I’ll still be available to any of my patients who have urgent needs come up) to wrap up the year and spend some time with family over the holidays.
Wishing you and yours a safe and happy holiday season, and I’ll be back with more to say in 2025.
One of the tools that I’ve gotten more interested in the past few years are Continuous Glucose Monitors (aka CGMs). These are patches that can be painlessly applied to the arm and that sync to an app on your phone, providing continuous information about your glucose levels. While they are not 100% accurate, they are close enough to more traditional methods for checking glucose (e.g. fingerstick) to give a pretty close estimate of your blood glucose at any particular moment, and since they can provide hundreds or even thousands of data points per day, can be used to track trends and see patterns.
Dr. Means trained as an ENT surgeon at Stanford University before deciding that our current profit driven sickcare model was the problem, not the solution, for most of the issues she was treating, and that she would rather serve patients in a different capacity. This led her to become a functional medicine practitioner, and later to help found the company Levels, which uses continuous glucose monitors to help people glean insights into their metabolic health and learn how to make improvements therein. Now, she’s written “Good Energy”, which has been on the NY Times bestseller list for the past few months.
If, like me, you came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably don’t remember a time when you weren’t warned to stay out of the sun. The message for the past few decades has been that sun exposure = skin cancer, and that if you absolutely have to go out during daylight hours for more than a nanosecond, to please not do so without first donning sunscreen and a full suit of body armor.
It’s true that excessive sun exposure can cause skin damage and increase the risk of skin cancers. But there’s (pun intended) a wrinkle to this. And that is that limiting sun exposure might also increase your risk of getting lots of other diseases, including heart disease and virtually every other known cancer. I’ll discuss some data about this in a moment, but first I want to just share some thoughts about sun exposure in general:
This post will be short. It’s Thanksgiving week and I want to wish all of our patients and readers a very safe and happy holiday. Though the office will be closed for the long holiday weekend, we are hosting family here in town and I will be around, so to all of my patients – I am available both by phone and in person if something urgent does come up.
Rather than just leave things at that, I’d also like to do something here that I’ve been meaning to do for awhile: post a link to a series of articles I wrote under an assumed name a few years back. At that time, I was employed by a large group practice and didn’t want to say or do anything that could put any of my partners in a difficult situation, so I wrote these under the name of “Reginald Bittermilk.” But since I now work independently, I no longer feel that restriction.
I wrote these articles at the request of a friend who wanted to publish a series of essays about what is wrong with America’s healthcare system from a doctor’s perspective, and what some possible solutions might be to fix things. If you find dealing with a mainstream doctor’s office to be frustrating, I hope this series will give you some insight into why the system is so broken, and some empathy for the challenges that doctors and nurses face every day in trying to deliver good care to their patients. When you need a break from your family this coming holiday weekend, you can read the series of articles at the following link:
This is not because I have anything against supplements per se. Some in fact have good evidence for them and can be quite beneficial. But it’s rare that a supplement is the most important part of the healing process, and often they are a band aid of sorts for something else that is going wrong in a patient’s life.
