“Don’t talk with your mouth full” is an expression we’ve all heard. And if we have children or younger siblings, we’ve also spoken it.  Did it arise out of decorum so the listener is not visually confronted with half eaten food or worse, spat upon? Or was it addressing the resulting mumbled and garbled speech? Or was it a medical admonition to prevent choking? The origins are unclear, but it’s fascinating to give consideration to our human design that has food, water, and air all having a common entry point into the human body.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) encompass a broad set of practices and beliefs that are outside evidence-based medicine as they are rarely subjected to well-designed and well-conducted multi-phase clinical trials. On this episode, we focus on a variety of CAM practices that share a common thread in the belief that their benefit is achieved through detoxification: the removal or rendering harmless things in the body which lead to ill health.

In 1660, a German physician first described an itch as an unpleasant sensation that inevitably prompts the desire to scratch. Itching and scratching were believed inseparable from one another. Together they constitute a cycle whereby the former is the cause and the latter is the effect. This cycle can become viscous whereby scratching creates an inflammatory response, which induces more itching. Identifying the cause of an itch becomes paramount as the cycle must be broken and prevented if possible.

On this episode, we focus on the critical function the lungs serve in the exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen.  Respiration or breathing is an involuntary action that occurs in the lungs, a critical organ for living, that we too often take for granted as we inhale air contaminated by smoke, chemicals, and microorganisms.

For thousands of years, urine was the primary tool physicians used to diagnose disease. It was referred to as the divine fluid and the window to the body. Tasting of urine to detect sweetness was common practice in the diagnosis of diabetes, giving it its medical name: diabetes mellitus. Mellitus is Latin for honey. On this episode, we explore the urinary tract, the organs that produce then excrete urine.

Veins are low pressure pipes that remove waste and carbon dioxide from our bodies’ cells, while arteries are high pressure distributors of nutrients and oxygen. Arteries get more attention as their associated disease states are responsible for life threatening conditions like heart attacks and strokes. But veins should not be overlooked as we will learn in this episode.

Signs and symptoms – observations of changes in our body that compromise our sense of wellness – are nature’s way of warning us that our bodies are under stress. However, they can be difficult to navigate. On this episode, we discuss when to ignore and when to act. 

Breast cancer has been at the forefront of cancer research and prevention strategies. On this episode, we discuss the changing treatment paradigm of earlier systemic therapy and the ever-increasing issues that have developed around surviving a disease that just decades ago was a death sentence.

Few medical concepts have so captured the public’s attention with its promise of eternal life and eternal youth as has regenerative medicine. On this episode, our callers discuss the first widely commercialized applications of regenerative medicine: platelet rich plasma and stem cell injections.

Aches and pains, cough and congestion, weakness and fatigue. There are an infinite number of ways we describe illness, but what does it mean to be well? Is wellness a state of mind, a state of being, does it exist? We explore wellness and the different ways patients pursue it.