Lyme Disease: Solving the Puzzle

Lyme Disease 2

Unsurprisingly for an illness known as “The Great Imitator,” the misconceptions surrounding Lyme Disease continue to proliferate. Acute or chronic? Highly treatable or stubbornly resistant? Misdiagnosed because of symptoms that mimic conditions like lupus, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, or overestimated for the same reason? While television celebrity Yolanda Foster recently gained national…

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Prescriptions: Take Exactly as Directed

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Look inside your medicine cabinet at your prescription bottles and ask: Have I read the label, stickered warnings and instructions? Have I discarded medications past their expiration dates? The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 80 percent of patients do not take their medications as prescribed. The prevalence of non-adherence to prescription directions has…

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Calorie Counting: A Weigh In

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Conventional wisdom: a calorie is a calorie, and to lose weight, you must take in fewer calories than you expend. Fast forward to today: all calories are not created equal. What makes up that calorie is more important than the calorie itself, emphatically stated by Jim Kirchoff, former CEO ofWeight Watchers. “When we have a…

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Eating Patterns and Good Health

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For generations, people have considered two distinctly different questions about eating habits: which diet is healthiest versus which diet results in the greatest weight loss. It has long been thought that the Mediterranean approach to eating is healthy, and new research has given additional credence to this fact. The New England Journal of Medicine recently…

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Artificial Sweeteners vs. Sugar

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When you reach for the artificial sweetener, do you pick the pink, nab a yellow, prefer the blue or go green? The difference may be less important than you think. Each of the sweeteners contains a different FDA-approved main ingredient. For example, Sweet ‘N Low contains saccharin, aspartame is in NutraSweet and Equal, neotame and…

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Yogurt Culture

Health Wise Winter 2014 FINAL DD11

Yogurt is recognized as a solid nutritional choice that delivers multiple benefits with each spoonful. It is made from pasteurized milk that has been fermented, and contains active cultures known as probiotics. Probiotics are live microbial food ingredients that, when ingested in sufficient quantities, provide notable health benefits. These living organisms have been recognized for…

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Medical Mysteries – Sneeze, Shivers, Yawns, Goose Bumps and Hiccups

Health Wise Winter 2014 FINAL DD1

The miracles of the human body are on continual display each day. Even involuntary actions, such as sneezing and shivering, help our bodies function optimally. The big sneeze. Every time we breathe in foreign particles, sensors in our noses and sinuses detect this, and signal the cilia (hairlike structures that line the nostrils) to sweep…

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Allergies: Food Allergies

Health Wise Winter 2014 FINAL DD3

Peanut-free tables in school cafeterias, grade schoolers armed with EpiPens…it is impossible to miss the signs of almost 15 million Americans who cope with increasingly prevalent food allergies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1997 and 2011 a significant spike occurred in American children, with one in every 13 now affected…

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