ultrawellness

You never expect these things to happen in life. But last year, three days before Christmas, I experienced a traumatic brain injury. As a practicing Functional Medicine doctor who has been in the field for more than 20 years, I love what I do and take great care of my health. I never expected something…

My 14 year old daughter Isabel brings up the rear behind two older brothers, who are 19 and 22. This isn’t my first adolescent rodeo. The boys took my wife and I to the brink of sanity but we survived and recovered just in time for another adolescent siege. When getting Isabel out of bed…

You don’t need experts to tell you we have a big fat problem, but obesity statistics are more staggering than you might imagine. The latest information from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) shows 39.6 percent of Americans are obese. Overall, there are over 100 million obese people in this country. As these…

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix Five years ago, I woke to up to…

Addiction is a powerful force that can sabotage your life and hurt those who surround you. Whereas researchers once considered addiction a weakness of character, in recent decades we’ve learned that brain-chemistry imbalances often underlie addiction to drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Rather than slap another drug onto that addiction, Functional Medicine seeks to…

I recently had the honor to answer some of my patients’ health questions, many of which inquired about  various aspects of having a  broken brain. One wondered whether someone with moderately severe Alzheimer’s would be okay eating ice cream if he’s doing everything else correctly. Another asked how Functional Medicine, which looks at the whole…

Stop a second and consider this:  You share your body with about 100 trillion other organisms. These bacterial cells live in your skin, mouth, nose, yet most of them reside in your digestive system and especially your large intestine. Imagine that. 100 trillion organisms. In fact, these bacterial cells outweigh human cells by about 10…

“He’s so bright but he’s failing because he won’t turn in homework and tunes teachers out,” one parent began when we first met. Another said during our first consultation: “She would do better if she wasn’t constantly talking and disrupting the class.” These understandably frustrated, worried parents bring their child into my office often because…