Brandon LaGreca
Cold and flu season is here. Add a pandemic into the mix, and the slightest cough or sniffle results in the sick individual spending several days at home. As this blog has repeatedly pointed out, building resilience in the form of immunity is the ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure in missing work or school.
Yet the coronavirus known as the common cold has eluded a cure for as long as we have been suffering with it. Or has it?
Will global governments mandate that every citizen be injected with a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2? Does the greater good outweigh the repercussions of introducing an RNA vaccine into the human gene pool? These are serious questions with critical implications for the future of human health and medical freedom.
If suffering from reflux, don’t settle for a “band-aid” solution and get to the root of the problem. Proton pump inhibitor drugs are appropriate for those who genuinely overproduce gastric acid but were designed for short-term use only. Taking them for years further degrades digestive vigor for someone not producing enough stomach acid. Clean up your diet and try on or more of these natural remedies to reclaim your digestive health and live free of the symptoms of reflux.
One bug, one drug—such is the philosophical undercurrent to allopathic medicine. Sometimes that principle works. I suffered for three weeks with pneumonia before the right antibiotic enabled my recovery. Even if the overwhelming majority of microbes that constitute the microbiome and virome support life and diversity, the human body can get overwhelmed when imbalanced. While…
My Facebook feed is an even mix of those questioning the conventional narrative of donning a mask (and practically everything else related to pandemic) and demeaning or self-righteous pleas to get everyone to wear a mask. Dare I say both sides can learn something from the other? Before a nuanced discussion on the topic, we…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the content of this video in which Dr. Zach Bush introduces the notion that viruses are synonymous with exosomes, fragments of genetic material (microRNA) that communicate danger within a species and enable adaptation. Exosomes represent the possibility of rapid evolution.
For the first time in recent memory, I was in tears listening to a patient share her story of grief. Sad news comes with being a clinician. Although I strive to remain professional yet compassionate, present but emotionally receptive, the heartache that ensued from this story spurred me to relay the interaction. It is one we all need to contemplate.
It was the first appointment with my patient after her diagnosis of uterine cancer and subsequent total hysterectomy. The prognosis was good: stage 1A with no lymph involvement. During her intake, I inquired if she was ready to adopt an anti-cancer lifestyle following this shake-up. It didn’t take long to recognize that she didn’t have a clear sense of what that involved, save for not using chemical herbicides anymore.
Solid, liquid, and gas—these are the three states of matter presented in the home-schooling science curriculum I was preparing to review with our 7-year-old daughter. The best example to learn these states is water in its different forms: moisture vapor in a cloud, liquid rain, and solid ice. I couldn’t stop there though, not when the intersection of biology and physics tells of a truly amazing fourth state of water that may be the key to life in the animal kingdom.
In an election year, paying for healthcare is one of the most discussed issues, with much of the rhetoric from politicians being polarized. On one side, any mention of universal healthcare is sloshed in the bucket of un-American socialism. On the other side, a single-payer option is championed as the only humane way forward.