Health pearls

As a marriage and family therapist, I was asked to speak at a recent Lady Docs gathering about family interactions that play a prominent role during this holiday season.  Feel free to journal as the group did last week as we explore family relationships. As therapists, we treat people as part of a family system and we focus on personal transformation as the agent of change ...

One of the talks at the conference was “Beyond Carb Counting: Why Plant-Based Nutrition is Sweet Medicine for Insulin Resistance”. It was delivered by Dr. Michelle McMacken, a board-certified internal medicine physician and an assistant professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine. She is vegan and is deeply involved with encouraging her patients to adopt plant-based ...

I had the pleasure of returning to my alma mater in the Bronx - Montefiore Hospital - where I did some of my clerkships in medical school, and the majority of the clinical work during my pulmonary fellowship.  It’s been renovated so much in the 31 years since I’ve been there that the only building I recognized was the concrete garage across the street. This conference, ...

This morning, my husband and I and several friends met at Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. for our third 5K run/walk for National Race to End Women’s Cancer, to support the Foundation for Women’s Cancer.  Gynecologic cancers include Ovarian, Cervical, Endometrial/Uterine, Vulva and Vaginal Cancer.  According to the American Cancer Society statistics, there were 110,070 ...

If you are living with overweight or obesity, then you may have already experienced a host of weight-related consequences. No, I am not referring to the standard medical warnings you’ve heard over the years, like monitoring your blood pressure or being tested for diabetes. Instead, I am referring to the pervasive weight-related bias that affects people living with obesity ...

Do you need cataract surgery and are wondering if laser cataract surgery is right for you? Cataract surgery is one of the most commonly performed and successful surgeries performed in medicine. Of course, as with any surgery, there are risks involved.  In some cases, laser-assisted cataract surgery may reduce those risks and improve your outcome.  A femtosecond laser uses ...

It seems that every cause has a day, week or month to bring awareness and that we can be inundated with these messages. With that in mind, this post is about an issue that most people don’t talk much about or know how to respond to: pregnancy and infant loss. October signifies the awareness of these kinds of losses with October 15th being the “Day of Light” where at ...

I had the pleasure of going to the 2019 International Conference of Nutrition in Medicine sponsored by George Washington University and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. This year’s speakers included researchers from Harvard, Yale and Brown, as well as Dr. Ostfeld from my alma mater, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The initial lecture was ...

*Hypertension in Either Partner Can Delay Pregnancy Time*  A study from China of 2,234,350 eligible couples, spanning from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2016, showed that preconception hypertension in either partner (high blood pressure in pre-pregnancy period) would prolonged the time to pregnancy. Women with hypertension were found to have 21% lower rate of pregnancy compared ...

Always up for a day out in nature, Lady Docs gathered at OASIS farm in Gaithersburg, MD this weekend to plant and harvest over 150 pounds of produce. OASIS (Organization for Advancement of Services for Individuals with Special needs) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for individuals with special needs. It is an amazing project of Dr. Chitra ...