“Do you take vitamins?” “No,” I answer my patients. “Why not? Aren’t they good for you?” The nuanced answer to that remains no. A truthful answer might be “when it’s been shown you need them.” Most Americans are not vitamin deficient. There is evidence that vitamins can be harmful, not helpful. And what generally gets […]
The Numbers Fetish (9/24/12)
Are You More Than Your Lab Test Numbers? I’ve heard the story many times: a patient comes into a doctor’s office for a “checkup”. He or she is handed glowing lab reports, told they’re in the peak of health – walks out and drops dead. So our lives are more than the sum of our […]
Doctor Versus Patient – The Case of Chronic Pain (6/25/12)
When Words Don’t Mean the Same Things to People If there are fifteen treatments for an illness, chances are good that many don’t work very well. That’s the case with chronic pain. Pain is really an information issue. The brain senses something is very awry. We then call that feeling pain. And our sense of […]
The doctor as drug (3/16/11)
Doctors or Technicians? “I don’t feel like I’m a person anymore, just a bunch of numbers. All she wants to talk about is tests and drugs.” That’s how patients describe some of their doctors these days – technicians. Bright, intelligent, often concerned, but technicians – purveyors of tests, gatekeepers of other technicians who will eventually […]