The latest study indicating red yeast rice’s ability to lower cholesterol levels surprised me – not because of the results (indeed it does work), but because the pharmaceutical companies have so much invested in statins, I’m surprised that a Chinese herbal remedy made it past the barricades!
First, if statins work to lower cholesterol, why go to an herbal supplement [...]

Before moving on to other blog topics (like what it’s like to try and find your sunglasses after 6 weeks) I want to pick up where I left off before the holiday weekend, and touch on a few of the aspects of Lyme that make it challenging to treat. These are complcating factors that many [...]

People often come into our Lyme clinic under a cloud of doom. They’ve read on the internet that Lyme never really goes away, and that they are never going to feel normal. Of course, I immediately try and reassure them that this does not have to be the case; if properly treated, Lyme can go [...]

My Arlington practice hosted its second Lyme clinic of the summer last Friday, with a steady hum of new patients who’ve been treated for Lyme but aren’t better, or who’ve been told they don’t have Lyme but think they might have it, or who feel the classic symptoms but never had a rash. With all that’s [...]

 
I’ve never disliked anything Michael J. Fox has been in, from Family Ties to his recent run on Rescue Me. (All right, Spin City could be a bit lame.)   And of course, we share an illness.  But I developed a new respect for him after attending a roundtable discussion last night on Parkinson’s Disease Research hosted [...]

Some recent online articles about the herbal supplement industry have had people asking my advice about safety concerns. The FDA is still not regulating supplement production, choosing instead to leave quality control in the hands of the manufacturers. There’s a lot of tainted and mislabeled product out there, and too many unsuspecting people are spending [...]

This morning NPR had a feature on Celiac Disease. For those of you who may not be aware, Celiac involves severe gluten intolerance (gluten is the main protein in wheat, oats, rye and barley), and affects nearly 3 million Americans. But for every person who actually has Celiac, there are ten people who are [...]

It’s official – the World Health Organization has designated the Swine Flu a pandemic, with over 30,000 cases reported worldwide. Health care experts believe the numbers of cases more likely number in the hundreds of thousands, with the CDC designating New England as an area that’s especially hard-hit.So how does this change things for those [...]