In 2005, it seemed that another herbal remedy bit the dust, as media blared that a New England Journal of Medicine Study showed immunity effects of Echinacea to be clinically insignificant.  Now another meta-analysis of 14 studies shows that Echinacea shortens the duration of a cold and reduces  the chance of catching a cold by 58% when taken prior to or at the first hint of a cold.  The source of the confusion?  The first (NEJM) study compared apples to oranges, using only one part of the Echinacea plant in a very low dose.  High quality supplements like Nutrilite and Herb Pharm that use a blend of leaf, stem, and root at higher doses do work, according to the latest analysis.  In addition, the NEJM study tested only one of the more than 200 viruses that can cause a cold.

What’s with this MRSA superbug?!  It starts out as a sore red pimple and gets bigger, hotter, harder, and redder.  After being treated with Bactrim or Augmentin, this staph infection can pop up all over your body, but especially where you sweat.  Have you noticed that it often starts in hospitals or in the locker room at the high schools that were shut down?  What these locations have in common is body fluid like sweat, and the place where YOU run into that is your gym.  Wash your hands a lot, bring your own yoga mat, wear weight-lifting gloves and cover the parts of your bod that touch things.  Wash your exercise clothes every time and take a shower after your workout instead of running twelve errands and ending up cooking dinner in the same outfit.

At one point, doctors joked that statins were so effective, we’d be putting them in the drinking water.  But lately they’ve taken a few hits.  A trial of designer drug Vytorin showed it was no more effective than a simple generic statin.  Many reports point out that there’s no data to show that statins prolong life, and many believe they should only be prescribed to those who’ve already evidenced heart disease.  And now there’s a lot of anecdotal stuff that statins make you stupid – cognitive effects, like muddled thinking and forgetfulness, that particularly seem to affect women taking statins.  People complain they suddenly forget the name of a grandchild, get lost while driving in a familiar area, or start a sentence and then can’t finish it.  Some have been diagnosed with early dementia, only to recover when they went off their statin!  Which seems weird, because there’s also been a lot of hubbub about statins preventing dementia, and isn’t confusion on the way to dementia?  The main point is this – (more…)

Holy granny panties!  In midlife, we’re not ready for the grannies but we’ve graduated from thongs.  Putting a thong on the average 50ish bod is like dressing up a pork chop as a hot wing – it just doesn’t work!  And even young thangs don’t necessarily enjoy pulling a string from between the cheeks.  I don’t yet need something to hold my Depends in place, but I don’t want a plumb line where the sun don’t shine either! If you don’t enjoy having your butt flossed, but you do enjoy that lecherous look in your guy’s eyes, what to do?   I’ve personally been on an informal search for years, and I’ve got the microfiber, lace, and cotton rejects clogging my top drawer to prove it!  We all make the same mistake on this quest – standing around staring at (more…)

The thinking continues to get more positive about menopausal hormones. The hysteria about hormones started when data from the Women’s Health Initiative Study was misinterpreted and misquoted in the media.  For the most part, the women in the study were too old to start taking hormones and had no menopausal symptoms.  Specialized physicians like Harvard’s Dr. Alan Altman M.D. were mystified by the reporting, since they could clearly see the limitations of the study and had seen women starting hormones in their 50’s thrive on brand name, FDA-approved bioidentical patches and gels. So, here are the facts (in his own words) on the WHI from an expert and author who understood from the beginning what the study showed and did not show. 
“The WHI did not study all “hormones.”  In fact, the ONLY hormones studied were Prempro© and Premarin© (non-human identical hormones and only pill form) – The WHI Study was not really about “all women”…average age of the women studied were 12 years after menopause…averaged 64 years old at outset of study – What WHI actually did show was that a 72-year old woman should not be started on oral Prempro© to protect her heart.

– Any small increase in dementia was seen only in women ages 75 to 80! (Numerous studies of women starting HT at the appropriate age close to their final menstrual period have demonstrated a 50% to 65% decrease in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.) (more…)