About

I am a physician with a myriad of interests including functional medicine, women’s health, nutrition, internal mediciine, geriatric and palliative medicine. My own personal travails throughout my life have led me to these varied interests. It seems that the Universe keeps presenting me with challenges to conquer in myself and friends and family so that I will better understand them when I am embarking on my duties as a doc. I really love what I do and am dedicated to pracitcing medicine using a holistic approach that facilitates the best interests of the people I see, as opposed to the best interests of pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, businesses, food industiries, government, etc which I think will lead to many interesting posts and comments in the future. So for starters, lets consider genetics and the human genome. You can now have your genome decoded and I chose to have mine done by Navigenics, http://www.navigenics.com.

A number of articles have appeared in the NY Times in the last several months regarding the expanding field of medical genetics. We are getting more information everyday about ways that genes and their expression are effecting our lives and our risks for disease. The information that we have may be ahead of our treatment options, but I predict that this field and the science surrounding it will be the next frontier. It is not so much the genes (there are only about 25,000 of them) but how they express themselves in our bodies through the proteins that they code for that seems to be important. You can’t change your genes but you can change the expression of those genes through the proteins that the genes code for that cause the manifestation of a healthy functioning body as well as certain diseases, for example breast cancer. This is an amazingly complex interaction that is not yet fully understood. The environment of nutrients, chemicals, toxins, etc that these genes sit in, are bathed in, or are surrounded by, have a say in what happens when the protein is designated by the genes to do its thing and even a teeny, teeny variation on this called a SNP (single nucloetide polymorphism) can alter the expression and may alter the event and send it down the path to breast cancer or not. This is a bit simplistic but watch for more and more information on the exciting new fields of genomics, proteomics, and nutrigenomics.

I look forward to learning with you and welcome to my blog. Of course the opinions that I express are mine and are not meant to suggest medical treatment for any reader of this blog.  For more information on my medical practice please visit my website.