As the seasons shift, I am reminded of Aesop’s fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper: The ant is industrious and works through the summer warehousing food and weather-proofing his home while the grasshopper frolics in the summer sun, not preparing for the coming winter and, ultimately, dies of exposure. The moral of the fable is “be responsible for yourself - be like the ant!”* The truth is most people are a mixture of ant and grasshopper…

Many people experienced weight gain in the last 18 months. The first and most important thing that I have to say about that is: Sounds normal and healthy. Adding layers of nutritional and emotional protection is a normal response to an existential threat. Physiologically, your body is always preparing for famine, and stress ramps up this preparation. Yay your body!!

As has been stated repeatedly throughout medical news media and other media sources, the SARS-COV-2 virus has highlighted infrastructure long broken in our society. Consider “ideal” weight one of them! The Body…

Antibiotic prescriptions are central agents in medicine. Sometimes life-saving, often helpful, they may shorten or eliminate suffering from bacterial infections, at any time from prior to birth until death. (Note that antibiotics are of no assistance when it comes to viral infections however.)

Compared to humans, bacteria have the genetic advantage of reproducing numerous generations in a single 24 hour period. Compared with our single generation in 15-20 years, this allows them to mutate, to try out multiple genetic patterns and perhaps become resistant to antibiotics, leading to…

A standard question I ask when taking a history of a patient with celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome is “what is your lifetime history of food poisoning, traveler’s diarrhea or gastroenteritis?” I may already have the clue if they report that they have never been well since a severe bout with Salmonella or Shigella. In other cases, years later a brief case of diarrhea, abdominal cramps and vomiting is not remembered, so I have to clarify that even a transient digestive upset such as this can be a trigger for post-infectious IBS or celiac disease. In contrast to the “never well since” cases, it may take years after the acute illness for the chronic GI problems to start.

When we traveled to London for a conference in 2019, my husband and I discovered a delightful health food store called Planet Organic. They sold a wonderfully delicious bread that I immediately fixated on. I saved the label so I could find it or its equivalent when we returned home. (I wish I still had the label so I could give proper credit.)

Even prior to the Coronavirus Pandemic, I knew I could not fly off to London every time I wanted that delicious bread, and the shipping costs alone from the UK would have been $35 – separate from the price of the bread itself.

Many of us find that fall brings colds and flus, in tandem with sweaters and lattes. As with last year, this year has given us unprecedented cause to support our immune systems.

Here are 10 tips to keep yourself and your loved ones healthy this season:

1. Cook Your Vegetables. To maintain optimal health, most people should eat nine servings of vegetables every day and what better way to enjoy the season’s bounty then a nice hearty stew? As the weather gets colder, do your digestive system a favor and cook your veggies. This makes them easier to digest.

Great strides have been made in recognizing that the use of pharmaceuticals in the treatment of pain, especially chronic pain, has been a failure. The state of Oregon now requires all health care professionals to complete continuing education in pain management in order to renew their practitioner licenses. The training includes information about behavioral practices such as dietary changes and appropriate exercise, and alternatives to prescription drugs including massage and acupuncture. Unfortunately, an effective alternative was omitted from the training - biofeedback including neurofeedback.

Most of us have experienced constipation at some point in our lives, due to a number of different causes. For some, constipation might have been the result of going overboard at their first fondue party in over a year, while for others extreme stress could have resulted in a temporary break up with fiber. In other cases, the causes of constipation are more serious, and may require medical intervention. To properly treat chronic constipation, first determine the cause of the constipation…

The living, breathing body is constantly sending out signals as a byproduct of its function. When a person goes to an appointment with a health care provider, it is common for a few readings to be taken - temperature, blood pressure, etc. This is information the body is generating as it goes about its business of being alive and can be a way to monitor whether it is functioning well. If the temperature is too high and/or the pulse oximetry is too low, concerns are raised.

Syndrome X, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, prediabetes… many names for essentially the same condition. For simplicity, I will use the term insulin resistance to describe the underlying process for this very common phenomenon that plagues at least 25% of the population in the Western world.

The general perception of traumatic brain injuries [TBIs] is that they result from one profoundly obvious single event - like in the movies - and are only serious if a person goes into a coma. Yes, this kind of TBI occurs all too often, but there are more complex ways to injure the brain. Most people - including practitioners - are blind to the possibility of more benign causes of brain injuries. It is much more common for people to be affected by one or more relatively innocuous "non-events" than land in the hospital in a coma and on life support.

The International Organization for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IOIBD) is a global organization comprised of physicians and researchers focused on studying treatments for IBD (Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis). The IOIBD includes 92 such scientists from 27 countries. A portion of this group recently met over zoom to discuss and recommend the best use of covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccines in IBD patients. In attendance were 34 adult gastroenterologists, 2 pediatric gastroenterologists, 2 GI surgeons and 1 pathologist. Participants included 18 from North America, 2 from South America, 13 from Europe, 3 from Israel, 3 from Asia and 1 from New Zealand.

Feeling stressed, frazzled, overwhelmed, tense, and anxious? Do you have a hard time stopping or controlling worry, fear, and what-ifs? Do you have a hard time feeling settled?

You are not alone. This is a common experience in our modern world -- full of stressors, demands, unpredictability, never-ending stimulation, and exposure to fear-based media coverage. The pandemic has not helped -- the rates of mental health disorders including anxiety and depression have skyrocketed over this past year.

As I discussed in a previous blog post, bile is produced in the liver and stored in the gallbladder. Released into the upper small intestine when a meal containing fat or protein leaves the stomach, one function of bile is to allow oil and water to mix. This enables absorption of most dietary fat including essential fatty acids (such as those in fish oil) and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K into the blood.

In the early 1960s, Norman Cousins, editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review, went to the USSR where he acted as an unofficial representative of the United States in negotiating what eventually became the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The schedule was tight and the pressure was high. In addition to the stress, Cousins was exposed to diesel exhaust while on the tarmac waiting to board a flight. He returned home extremely ill with mysterious symptoms that were eventually identified as connective tissue disease and ankylosing spondylitis. The prognosis was bad.

The respiratory diaphragm is a large, thin, dome-shaped muscle demarcating the boundary between the chest (aka thorax) and the abdomen. Above are the heart, lungs, and esophagus; below are the stomach spleen, liver/gall bladder, kidneys/adrenals, and intestines. The esophagus and stomach being in 2 different cavities need a way to link up. This meeting place is the hiatus of the diaphragm.

A study published in the April 1999 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed the amazing power of journaling. The study involved people who had either rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or asthma. The control group - a mix of folks with RA and others with asthma - were asked to write about “emotionally neutral topics” such as what they had eaten for lunch, while the experimental group was asked to write about “the most stressful event of their lives”.

GERD is a general term for pain or esophageal tissue damage caused by stomach contents moving up into the esophagus, throat or mouth. It is a very common problem, but there are several conditions that fall correctly under the category of reflux and others that may feel symptomatically very similar, but not involve reflux at all. Let’s start with 4 ways that true reflux can manifest.

Many years ago, I was contacted by a family who had been told their child had “dysgraphia”, a neurologically based impairment of the ability to write by hand. The parents had read what they could about the disorder and wondered whether neurofeedback would help.

Patients come to see me with GI issues; it is my general focus of treatment. The gastrointestinal system has only so many symptoms with which to present a myriad of ailments, which causes a lot of overlap in the way different underlying causes manifest as symptoms.