Your empowerment through information is the underlying principle of our site. Our mission is not only to provide information that relates to specific medical issues, but even more importantly, information that reveals the keys to maintaining health and preventing disease. Welcome!
Integration Psychotherapy, pioneered by our guest, Dr. Ingmar Gorman, is a fascinating technique that brings a powerful level of therapeutic efficacy to the use of psychedelics. Psychedelic experiences are certainly becoming more available, and what we learn today is how fundamentally important it is to appropriately process these experiences after they have occurred. So much literature is being published describing the efficacy of psychedelic compounds in the treatment of things like PTSD and refractory depression, but as Dr. Gorman makes clear, it’s not just the taking of the medicine that fully allows realization of improvement. Equally important is the post-experience therapy that helps frame and contextualize what the psychedelic experience has presented. Continue reading
By Dr. Austin Perlmutter
In the wake of the global spread of the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19), many of us have started to think more carefully about our health. How can we reduce our risk of infection and of infecting others? How can we improve our immune function? What might the virus do to our lungs, heart and blood vessels? But while these questions are very important, it’s also critical to consider how a pandemic affects our brains and how to guard them against this damage. Specifically, we need to be considering strategies to protect our mental and cognitive health.
We’ve long known that mental health suffers in periods of high stress. So it’s no surprise that the current pandemic has been linked to a spike in feelings of anxiety and depression. A troubling May 2020 survey reported that over 34% of Americans are now experiencing these symptoms. This comes at a time when the world is already experiencing an epidemic of mental illness. Continue reading
By: The Dr. Perlmutter Team
Blood sugar elevation has become a central focus in medicine these days because of its well-established relationship to so many chronic conditions including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, obesity, and Parkinson’s. Now, new research reveals that there may well be a relationship to cancer risk as well.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins and Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea were interested in exploring possible relationships between blood sugar levels and risk for developing cancer. They studied a sample of over 1 million Koreans between the ages of 30 and 95 who had either a positive cancer diagnosis or had died of cancer. Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are quite remarkable and certainly instructive. Continue reading
“I can feel your sadness.” This is a declaration we are certainly hearing frequently these days. And it’s not to be taken lightly. Experiencing another person’s sadness, for example, and having the ability to share in their feelings is called emotional empathy. It is emotional empathy that helps us build emotional connections with other people and ultimately serves as the thread of our existence as social beings.
Our ability to share in the joy of another person’s success or achievement, as well as our sense of heartbreak when someone experiences a personal tragedy, are fundamental elements of our social fabric. Simply stated, our social existence depends deeply on our ability to participate in the emotional experiences of others. Continue reading
In the past, I have written several blogs discussing the relationship of body measurements like body mass index (BMI) to cognitive function, as well as relationships between what is called the waist-to-hip ratio with atrophy of the brain. Another important relationship that we have explored extensively in the past is the connection between excess body fat and inflammation.
So, one might wonder if the mechanism whereby obesity relates to declining cognitive function, like worsening memory, may be mediated by inflammation. Basically, the question I am asking has to do with connecting these dots. Continue reading
Join me on Facebook, for our daily Coronavirus Community Conversation. I’ll share some of the latest news and science, answer your questions, and offer a forum where we can connect in the time of social distancing. Continue reading
When we were children, we were told that “please” and “thank you” were “magic words.” Indeed, they are. These days it seems like there is a palpable decline in what used to be common activity as it relates to socially appropriate behavior. And now, more than ever, expressing gratitude can go a long way towards helping someone feel happier.
There is actually science that clearly supports both how we as a culture tend to undervalue the importance of demonstrating gratitude as well as how it positively affects the recipient. And that is unfortunate because we know that the expression of gratitude improves the well-being of both the expresser as well as the recipient. So, if expressions of gratitude are such powerful tonics, why don’t we do more of them? Continue reading
It’s quite likely that very few people wouldn’t want to do everything they could to preserve the integrity and functionality of their brains. As it turns out, we, each and every one of us, have a lot to say about how our brains change over time.
We certainly don’t need to be reminded that persistent head trauma can pave the way for brain degeneration as we have seen with professional football players and others involved in contact sports. Further, there has been a lot written about the value of exercise in terms of a brain preservation program. Sleep, both its duration as well as its quality, has also gotten some of the spotlight as of late as we have begun to recognize how, during deep sleep, our brains are actually quite active in terms of ridding themselves of potentially damaging accumulations of various types of chemicals and debris. Continue reading
Loading More