I am proud to announce that, several months after ordering it, our Styku body composition scanner arrived last week and is now operational. Starting immediately, my patients can regularly have painless, non-invasive, radiation free body scans here in the office that will provide them with key information about their metabolic health and their risk for developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and cancer, as well as feedback about weight loss and fitness efforts.
A few years ago, back when I was still an employee at a large corporate practice, a middle aged woman who I knew well came to see me complaining of abdominal pain. I took a history from her, examined her carefully, and reviewed her recent labs. After doing so, I was reassured that she had nothing serious going on and needed no further workup for the moment.
So I did exactly the sort of “irrational” thing that makes no sense to an insurance company but all the sense in the world to a doctor: I ordered an abdominal ultrasound.
The photo above is of John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Standard Oil Company, he is considered by many historians to be the single richest human being who ever lived. Mr. Rockefeller was simultaneously a ruthless businessman and a very generous philanthropist, and is thus remembered as both a villain and a hero of American history. But for the purposes of this article, what’s relevant is that Mr. Rockefeller lived to the age of 97, and remained mentally sharp and physically active right up until almost the very end of his long life.
I’ve mentioned in a prior blog post that I’m a history buff and that I sometimes wonder whether we can learn anything from the past about better health habits. So it was that while reading a biography of Mr. Rockefeller a few years ago, I was struck by something – John D. Rockefeller was a devotee of circadian medicine, nearly a century before the field was even invented.
I’ll come back to John D. Rockefeller in a moment, but first: what is Circadian medicine?
In my last post, I touched on some factors other than diet and exercise that can impact your weight loss efforts.
Today I want to discuss three random studies. None of them have anything to do (at least not directly) with each other, and none of them represent “the” solution to weight loss. I highlight them rather to reinforce the point that, if you are paying attention to the ever expanding (no pun intended) science of obesity and weight loss, you should understand that eating more and moving less are only one part of the story.
One of my biggest interests – and one of the most common goals patients have – is weight loss. It’s also a common area of frustration. After all, it SHOULD be a simple thing. Change your diet and move more, right? What could be easier than that? And yet, millions of Americans try this approach every year, and most of the time it fails them. Why?
I bill myself as a “holistically minded” doctor. What I mean by this is not that I have any formal training in “holistic” care – I haven’t, for example, done a course in functional medicine, or in acupuncture. Rather, I have always had the bias that the human body is a wondrous and complex machine about which even we 21st century doctors know very little, and that many health problems can be either averted or healed if the body is simply given the optimal environment and left to do its own thing.
