I went to medical school in 1996 — almost 30 years ago. In that amount of time, there has been a lot of positive forward momentum in health and healing, and many diseases that were considered terminal now have amazing outcomes thanks to new developments such as biological therapies for cancer treatment and autoimmune diseases.
Advances in our understanding of how to help the body heal are not a new thing — centuries ago physicians used leeches in blood letting, or prescribed time by the sea when they were not sure what else to offer (which I think is still a good idea — any time on the earth, especially near water, encourages the healing practice of grounding, more on that in advancement #9, below!)
So today, now that we are in the autumn transition and it reminds me that time is moving along quite quickly as I watch leaves begin to fall, I thought I’d share with you an article I wrote for MaryJane’s Farm Magainze for the recent “By and By” issue. If you have not heard of MaryJane’s Farm if you like organic lifestyle tips and natural living, you will LOVE her magazine — I’ve been so honored to have a routine health column in this magazine for many years now because MaryJane has been a mentor of mine that I have looked up to and admired since I discovered her books decades ago. She is my own personal heroine, so much so that I carry her autographed books in my online shop (which you can find right here.)
Back to my favorite 10 advances in medicine that have happened since I became a practicing physician 25 years ago… here we go:
10 Changes In Healthcare In The Past 20 Years
1. The Food Pyramid Topples:
When I was in medical school, we were taught the food pyramid provides optimum health for our patients. But in the decades since, we’ve learned that the carb heavy bottom of the food pyramid is not supportive of our body’s long term health. The outdated recommendation was up to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta daily… In addition, all fats were to be universally avoided.
Because of the heavy emphasis on breads and grains, even if you were able to stick with the food pyramid for your meals, you would be missing out on essential vitamins and minerals your body needs from fresh fruits and vegetables and legumes and nuts and seeds. On top of being nutritionally deplete, we’ve also realized that gluten (found in many of those empty carbs the food pyramid was recommending) is a neuroirritant and that health fats are to be actively consumed, not avoided.
Dr. Pearlmutter suggests that gluten is not just a neuroirritant to the brain, but it is actually neurotoxic. He feels that gluten may be casting a brain-fog over our entire civilization! In his book Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar — Your Brain’s Silent Killers, Dr. Perlmutter advocates saving your brain by starting a high-fat, nearly carbohydrate-free diet. His assertion is that this can prevent or greatly lower dementia risk and progression — and he’s armed with plenty of data to back up the claim. More recent evidence suggests that not only does the brain inflammation that gluten causes affect your mental clarity, it might also be causing or worsening mood disorders like depression and anxiety. Research published in Frontiers In Psychiatry in Jul 2022 found that not only did a diet low in carbohydrates — with an emphasis on proteins and veggies — help with refractory epilepsy and other organic brain diseases, but it also provided significant improvements in both depression and psychosis symptoms as well as in metabolic health, with improved weight, blood pressure, blood glucose and blood lipid profiles.
So now, replacing the food pyramid, we have the “MyPlate” suggestion, which is similar to a paleo diet, with a focus on high quality protein (grass fed beef), wild fish, eggs, nuts, seeds and colorful fruits and vegetables. In addition, I would recommend including high quality high fats in the diet (coconut oil, olive oil, organic butter, avocado too.
Consider cutting your gluten and sugar intake in half (or even trying to go gluten and sugar free) for one month and see if you feel more clear headed and energetic. It’s been my experience that patients who are experiencing a brain fog feel dramatically better in just a few short weeks of reducing carbs and gluten.
I talk a bit more about reducing gluten in your diet for longevity and improved brain function in this blog post I wrote for you here:
2. Eating Certain Fats Becomes Good:
Have you been told your high cholesterol level is bad for your heart? Are you on medication to treat high cholesterol? Although you can’t generalize for all people, the focus on reducing cholesterol is a bit outdated. The studies on cholesterol that most physicians base their understanding of it on is based on studies that are several decade old, and most of what we were taught about cholesterol in medical school is indeed wrong. While some old school physicians are still narrowly focused on fat consumption and monitoring lipids in the blood. But the new studies that have come out over the past 20 years are showing that it is actually inflammation that causes the damage that builds plaques and increases mortality due to heart attack and stroke.
More recent studies reveal that saturated fat intake does not increase rate of death, it’s actually inflammation — and the long term damage that inflammation does to our blood vessels — that increases mortality rate. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) online released a medical report which found absolutely no increase in mortality with saturated fat consumption, no association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes or over all mortality, a protective benefit from consuming naturally occurring trans-palmitoleic acid (in dairy) to reduce diabetes risk, a moderate association between industrially synthesized trans hydrogenated fats and increased mortality, but no association between naturally occurring trans fats and mortality.
So the bottom line? Naturally occurring fats do not increase mortality. And actually, healthy fats (like omega 3 fatty acids) reduce inflammation throughout the body and support cardiovascular and brain health, even helping to preserve brain volume, prevent psychosis and lower cancer risk. A study published in 2016 in JAMA Internal Medicine, showed that higher levels of Omega 3 fatty acids actually lowered the risk of having a fatal heart attack within 10 years. While fish has unfortunately become a contaminated source of Omega 3 fatty acids, you may wish to focus on getting high quality Omega 3s in your diet through nuts, seeds, algae oil or flax seed oils for those health benefits.
I had the pleasure of meeting the late Dr. Sinatra — the top Integrative Cardiologist in America — while filming the motion picture The Grounded. He actually spent his birthday filming in my home! His research revealed that it is actually sugar consumption that is the main culprit of inflammation leading to heart disease. He ascertained that the highly refined, processed, preserved foods and large amounts of sugar in the typical American diet causes the body to be chronically inflamed. Read Dr. Sinatra’s book The Great Cholesterol Myth for a more in depth look at why cholesterol is not the bad guy and for a detailed heart healthy plan to live healthier and live longer, and guidance for helping some folks to come off of their statin medication.
3. Hormone Replacement Therapy Went From Good To Bad To Good Again:
Right before I entered medical school, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was encouraged and a popular choice for perimenopausal and menopausal women, so we were taught extensively about it in pharmacology and Ob/Gyn rotations. Right after I started practicing medicine, a huge study was released advising against HRT, saying the benefits did not outweigh the risks for most women. Because of this, there was mass panic with many women stopping their hormone replacement and not very many requests to start it from patients. So for most of my practicing years, I did not routinely suggest or prescribe hormone replacement for women.
Recently, the tide has changed, and the data from that original study was found to be faulty, as well as many additional studies now showing that in perimenopausal (and early menopausal) women, there are multiple benefits of HRT, including significant protection against cardiovascular disease, protection against bone loss, and an over all reduction in all cause mortality (meaning HRT use was correlated with a longer lifespan.)
There are estrogen receptors not only in the reproductive organs, but all throughout the body: in the brain, bones, heart and blood vessels, which help explain these benefits as well as the brain benefits of reducing peri-menopausal brain fog, mood changes and cognitive decline. If HRT is started in perimenopause, it can even reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia risk in half!
To keep of with the latest medical studies on HRT, I attended a recent medical conference that was devoted entirely to hormones and hormone replacement. I had just turned 50, and I left that meeting super excited to start bioidentical hormones myself, and the recommendation from the most recent study results suggest the best way to take bioidentical hormones is to apply them transdermally (to the skin) for maximum benefit. I have been on bioidentical hormones for almost a year now, and I love my topical bio-est cream — if you’ve noticed my skin looking better in my more recent videos, that is what I 100% attribute it to!
f you’re have been in menopause for 9 years or less, you are likely a candidate for hormone replacement therapy. Talk to your in person physician, who will help you decide, and check out my protocol for perimenopause and menopausal women that includes the exact same topical bio-identical cream that I personally use — you can see my Complete Menopausal Support Protocol here and feel free to send me a message through my contact page here if you have any questions on that protocol before giving it a try!
4. Telemedicine Booms:
When I was a newly practicing doctor, telemedicine was pretty unheard of. Certainly it was never brought up in medical school, I was never exposed to a single physician who practiced it, and it was never presented as an option to graduating physicians.
Since then, telemedicine has grown exponentially, spurred on and normalized by the COVID-19 pandemic during which about 50% off all visits to a medical provider was conducted via telemedicine… and has now taken root and stayed as an integral part of medical care, with many advantages to both patients and physicians. Before the pandemic, less than 0.1% off medical appointments were through telemedicine, during the pandemic about half of all visits were virtual, and since the pandemic, and currently about 17% of all visits (in 2023) were via Telehealth.
Advantages of Telehealth include making health care much more accessible to many more people, it helps to alleviate sudden shortages in the workforce of the healthcare industry, and it helps to control the skyrocketing costs of healthcare.
Hopefully medical schools and residency programs are now including training into practicing virtual medicine, as well as helping to identify what issues are safely treated remotely and which are better to seek in person care for, as well as helping young physicians develop their virtual bedside manner through practicing Telehealth as part of the normal curriculum.
5. Cannabinoids Are De-stigmatized:
When I started practicing medicine, the endocannabinoid system of the human body was not well understood and we were given no education and no practical experience with using cannabinoids to treat any health concerns aside from medical marijuana. All cannabinoids were treated with suspicion and lumped into the same category as illicit drug use.
Thankfully, there has been a huge explosion of education and research into the importance of the entire cannabinoid system, including the discovery of many different types of cannabinoids and their effects on the human body. Similar to HRT from #3 above, there have been cannabinoid receptors found throughout the body, including the brain, skin, digestive tract, bones and more. Research has reveals significant benefit to reducing seizure activity, anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain, arthritis, inflammation, as well as a boost to the immune system.
This latest study on the immune boosting benefits of CBD (published in September 2023 in Nutrients) found that after only 8 weeks of daily CBD supplements, natural killer (NK) immune cell function was significantly enhanced. That means not only boosted immune function but potentially boosted anti-cancer benefits. The dose required for this effect? Only 50 mg CBD daily. Another recent study found topical application of CBD reduced shingles pain by and average of 88% in the majority of patients studied, with no negative side effects and well tolerated by all.
CBD Oil has now emerged as mainstream and is one of the most frequently searched terms on internet search engines. The forms that there are available for CBD Oil consumption — gummies, tinctures, capsules, baked goods, mints, vapes, topical lotions and more — as well as all the different types of CBD oils — full spectrum, broad spectrum, and isolate versions — as well as how of many different cannabinoids there are, including CBA, CBG, CBN, CBC, CBD and more, make this supplement almost overwhelming to choose. Because this is a new and relatively unregulated industry I recommend only pharmaceutical grade, third party tested CBD oil products grown organically in the United States.
There is only one CBD oil product I recommend — that’s because I know that how each ingredient is grown (organically) and where supplement is made (in the USA) how it is processed (cold pressed) and how it is stored (in a pharmaceutical grade storage facility) which is just as important as what the ingredients are.
ECS Therapeutics CBD supplements are prescription grade, pharmacy quality CBD oil products that are only available through a physician and it’s the CBD formulation I personally use and recommend. You can ask your in person physician for an ECS Therapeutics prescription, or you can fill out my contact request form here for more information on ordering prescription strength CBD products through me.
6. Understanding Just How Much We Need To See Plants:
Our bodies crave nature so much that it’s actually physically healing for us to be around plants of any kind, — for example, just seeing a plant through a window or adding a potted plant to a workspace can provide measurable health benefits. This is something that was never mentioned during any of my medical education and it took a great deal of research on my own to truly understand how much the earth (and touching the earth, through the healing practice of grounding) impacts our long term well being,. As a result I have devoted a large portion of my medical career to advocating more awareness around our human body’s physical need to connect with the earth.
Multiple studies have found that having access to a green space decreases depression rates, anxiety rates, and dramatically reduces stress. One study, called the MIND study (conducted in 2007) found that simply walking through a garden or greenway significantly improved mental health, while walking through areas without greenery (such as a shopping mall) significantly decreased mental health. Another study, published in Scientific Advances in 2020, found that after only one month of playing on a small playground that had an area converted to a greenspace, the children’s immune systems got a significant boost, with markers of immunity in the blood, like TGF-β1 levels, regulatory T cells and the plasma IL-10:IL-17A ratio, all increasing after just 28 days of playing in these small urban green spaces. All it took to get these improvements to their immunity was a small patch of grass to play on, one that included a small planter with garden crops and some berry bushes. You can read more about that in this blog post I wrote for you after that study came out:
If simply walking through or playing a green space impacts our health so much, you can probably guess that working with plants — hand’s on gardening — would boost health even more. And you would be right. After an extensive systemic review of 22 studies looking at the health impact of gardening, the results of a meta-anylsis (published in Preventive Medicine Reports in 2016) found that gardening significantly reduced anxiety levels, anger levels and depression rates, decreased tension, stress levels and boosted mood… all while simultaneously improving life satisfaction and boosting over all quality of life. Another study published in 2006 in the Medical Journal of Australia found that daily gardening decreased dementia risk by an incredible 36%. A follow up study, published in 2019 in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that gardening actually increased levels of brain nerve growth factors. Another study, published in January 2020 in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that a gardening significantly boosted levels of the brain neurotransmitters tryptophan and serotonin, which are necessary for healthy sleep patterns and mood stabilization. You can read more about the health benefits of gardening in an article I wrote for you here:
We have a innate need to be around plants so much that even being around an indoor plant can positively impact on your well being, so don’t discount the power of a windowsill garden or a simple house plant to support your health. An exciting study published in 2015 in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology, showed that simply adding plants to an indoor computer room not only boosted the worker’s productivity, it also significantly decreased their blood pressure. Another study, published in 2007 in the American Society for Horticultural Science found that workers with potted plants in close proximity to them while working took less sick leave off from work and enjoyed increase productivity.
In medicine we’ve known this for a while — a study published in Science back in 1984 found that patients who simply had a view of plants through a window while recovering from surgery had better moods, used less pain medications, had less surgical post-op complications, and even decreased their length of stay in the hospital. Less pain during recovery and getting to go home sooner after surgery just by looking at plants? That’s an awesome health strategy that I wish more hospital and clinics would take into account when designing their architecture.
No matter how big or small your space is, whether you have a windowsill garden, a potted houseplant or two, a few medicinal herbs grown on your porch, access to a community vegetable garden or pick-your-own orchard or berry farm, or are even blessed enough to have your own land, tending to plants is one of the most rewarding, most pleasurable activities that I can recommend, so consider adding more plants to your world, either indoors or out… doctor’s orders!
7. Prolonged Sitting Is Harmful:
When I was going though med school and we were learning about exercise physiology, the mind-frame was that one intense session of exercising, 60 minutes long, three times a week was ideal for our physical health. Newer research is showing that it’s not so much about fitting all your physical activity into one chunk of time, or even doing a scheduled formal exercise routine at all, to protect your long term health, it’s actually more simple than that: it’s about avoiding sitting for more than a few hours at a time.
One such study, published in 2015 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that prolonged sitting each day is associated with an increased risk of death from all causes, including a higher risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. And important to note in this study that exercising did not protect against this risk or prolong lifespan, as even those who exercised strenuously had a higher risk of death if there were prolonged periods of sitting in between work outs.
Turns out, sitting 6 hours or more a day raises your mortality risk no matter how hard you exercise before or afterwards. Another study recently showed that inactivity is actually more deadly than obesity. So sustainable health is not about weight, it’s not about working out, it’s not about exercising, it’s not about being a weekend warrior, it’s not about how hard you push yourself on the treadmill, and it’s not about fitting into any Body Mass Index category. Real health is about enjoying moving the body you are in.
This goes against the corporate world, which would have you sit at your computer working around the clock. And it goes against the factory model, which would have you performing the same task over and over again, uninterrupted, without breaks, all shift long. And it goes against the school system, which would have your child remain quietly seated from roughly 8 AM to 3 PM on a daily basis. This model of health — to sit still in school or at work for 90% of your day and then push yourself to get in that cardio for 10% of the day during PE or at the gym — is not supportive of your longevity.
A fabulous study (published in 2019 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine) found that replacing just 30 minutes of sitting each day with light physical activity was enough to significantly decrease over all mortality rates. And it’s never too late to start this, because here’s the clincher in that study: the health benefit of replacing sedentary time with light physical activity was actually even stronger if you were older than 75 years old. So light activity decreased mortality rates in adults older than 75 years old even more than it decreased mortality rates in younger age groups. In other words, the older you are, the more that activity of any kind increases your lifespan.
Now of course it’s awesome if you love working out hard and playing sports. Being active is always going to be awesome. But it’s not awesome to sit for more than a few hours at a time. Our body’s are simply not meant to sit in one place for hours. In fact, it’s better to just get up and stretch throughout the day, take a walk at lunch, take the steps instead of the elevator, throw the frisbee with your kids after dinner and do a few yoga poses before bedtime then it is to hit the gym hard for an hour that day and then sit sedentary for the rest of the day.
So today, I don’t you to worry about exercising. Today, I hope you’ll move your body because it feels good to stretch, because it increases your energy level to walk around and get fresh air, and because it helps you sleep better at night to have gotten a bit of sunshine during the day. Enjoy living in your body, my friend. Treat it right. All you’ve got to do is get up and move every hour or two. If you do that, than you have significantly protected your long term health.
8. A Better Understanding Of Aging:
I recently attended a medical conference on aging and geriatric health, and it was very eye opening on what we now know about aging that we did not know back when I was in medical school. Recent evidence suggests that aging and lifespan are not concrete and set in stone, but more of a balance between the amount of inflammation in the body (and inflammatory cytokine levels) with the amount of stem cell regeneration your body is capable of (this is how our tissues repair and refresh.)
Although aging is complex and involves many factors including genetics, environment and epigenetics, the bottom line is this: once the stem cells are no longer able to replace your organ tissues, then your body is no longer capable of organ repair. Instead of replacing damaged cells and tissues, the body goes into frailty syndrome (a medical term to mean that there is no more reserve function in the body) and then the levels of inflammation that are damaging those organ systems ultimately cause the body to shut down. The newest term, that was not understood a few decades ago, is “Inflammaging” meaning inflammation driven morbidity and mortality in the elderly.
Because one of the key components to aging is being in a pro-inflammatory state, anti-inflammatory strategies can also be powerfully anti-aging. Elevated levels of inflammation in the bone marrow, lungs, liver, lymph nodes, nerves, kidneys, heart, GI tract and other important organs ultimately results in end organ failure. To decrease the levels of inflammation in the body is to boost the body’s ability to function longer with less decline in organ function.
A great overview of the balance between inflammation and tissue regeneration was published in June 2023 in Nature, and suggests there are quite a few things we can do to decrease inflammation while scientists look into boosting stem cell regeneration — an important pathway to prolong lifespan for future generations. Strategies for decreasing total inflammation over a lifetime include consuming key antiinflammatory nutrients (like anti-oxidants, probiotics, polyunsaturated fats, vitamins like C, D, & E, minerals like zinc) as well as exercise and stress management (more on this in #9, below.)
I would also include grounding in the list of crucial activities that keep inflammation in the body low. In one study published in 2009 in The Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, researchers found that grounded subjects had statistically significant decreases in blood markers of inflammation compared to non-grounded subjects. A good overview of how grounding decreases whole body inflammation was published June 2014 in the Journal of Inflammation Research. And a more recent study, published January 2019 in Frontiers in Physiology, found that inflammatory cytokines such as such as IP-10, MIP-1α, and sP-Selectin, all decreased in grounded subjects, compared to non-grounded controls. The average drop induced by grounding a patient was a 10 – 20% drop in inflammatory cytokine concentration. For more information on the anti-aging benefits of grounding, hop over here to watch a quick video I made for you about it:
None of these things were understand to impact the rate of aging just 30 years ago when I entered medical school, so be sure your in-person physician is keeping up to date on the current medical research on healthy aging and is making supportive suggestions to help your body get out of a pro-inflammatory state and into a regenerative state of function.
9. The Damage of Being A Workaholic:
Job stress may cause as many as one out of every seven new cases of depression, anxiety and other common mental disorders, suggests a study published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2018. Researchers looked at over 6,800 participants, ranking job strain at age 45 with risk of mental illness at age 50. The results were astounding. Having a job that is highly demanding increased mental diagnosis rates by 70%. Having a job that causes high strain (moves at a fast pace, or is highly risky, for example) increased mental diagnosis rates by 220%. Having a job in which the employee had very little control over decisions increased mental illness rates by 89%. All in all, researchers estimate that simply having higher job stress increased the overall likelihood of subsequent mental illness significantly, accounting for 1 out of every 7 new cases of mental illness in midlife.
Forget the usually-thought-of triggers such as divorce, bereavement and serious medical issues… job strain alone can put you at significant risk for mental disorders. What constitutes a stressful job? A job that requires high intensity, a job that moves at a fast pace, a job that has high risk, a job that gives you very little control over your duties, and/or a job that doesn’t allow you to make your own decisions were all factors that contributed to job strain. If you are thinking… yes my job is stressful but I really love it, it’s not enough. Job satisfaction was actually not protective of the strain that job stress can put on mental health.
So factor job strain into your career choices early on whenever possible. Look for a job that allows you to be a part of the decision making process, or look for a job with lower intensity and a slower pace if you have an option and want to be protective of your mental health. If you are already in a stressful job that you want to stay in, consider small ways to modify your current stress levels at work. Ask to be part of decisions whenever possible… if there are committees to be involved in, if there are meetings you can speak up during, if there are opportunities for a leadership role — this study shows that even in a highly stressful job, having some sort of say in what decisions are made allows the job to cause less strain over all. Negotiate terms whenever possible… not just the classic example of asking for a raise, but speaking up over anything you can… such as negotiating when you take a break, what shift you work, what snacks are stocked in the vending machine, or what the dress code is can help give you some say in your work day and reduce strain.
If you can’t make decision and you can’t negotiate terms, sharing the burden is another way to reduce job strain. Asking for help, getting co-workers involved, turning individual tasks into group tasks, forming alliances, delegating and and all tasks that you can delegate — these are all ways to reduce job strain even in jobs that are highly stressful and where you have little control.
If you neither of those are possible, and you are in a job that you can’t modify, can’t control, has high stress, and little autonomy, then the next best thing you can do to protect your mental and physical health is to make sure off hours are actually off hours. Make it harder to access work related tasks… leave your computer at work (if you work from home, leave your computer in a designated *home office* space and do not bring it into the rest of the house!). Put cell phones on airplane mode at night, or better yet turn them off completely. Designate a cut off time in the evening where you will no longer check emails or return business related calls. Prioritize sleep. Move your body in a non-job related way: exercise, stretch, get into a yoga routine, go on a long walk, even simply taking a hot bath in Epsom salts will help soothe tense muscles and get you out of “work mode.” Read a book that is absolutely 100% simply for pleasure and *not work related!!!* Schedule time for leisure activities — from a designated weekly movie night to a routine family date to time alone — off time is so crucial for balancing out the stress from your job and should be given the same weight (or even more weight) than your dedication to your career. Take time for friendships and relationships that are not in any way work related. If most of your relationships are with people in the same work place or career path as you, be sure to go out of your way to nurture friendships and relationships that have nothing to do with work at all — join a knitting club or a book club or sign up for a gym membership or introduce yourself to your neighbors — meet people that it would be literally impossible to “talk shop” with in your down time because they do not work with you. Having outside interests and outside relationships apart from work helps ensure you don’t think about or talk about work in your off time.
And finally, take vacation time — up to 1/3 of all vacation days are simply never even used!!!! What the…? No way. Please take those vacation days, every single one of them.
10. Sun Exposure Went From Bad To Good
A huge landmark study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 2016 found that people who stayed indoors and avoided sun exposure actually had a shorter life span than those who spent time outside. This study looked at almost 30,000 participants (females ages 25 – 64 year old with no history of malignancy) and followed them over a span of 20 years, tracking health outcomes and life span.
What did they find? Researchers found that even when smoking was factored in, the life span of those who avoided the sun was over 2 years shorter than heavy smokers who got the highest amount of sun exposure!!! So even heavy smokers who soaked in the sun their whole life outlived non-smokers who avoided sun exposure… by several years on average. Participants who avoided the sun had higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and pulmonary disease. And the results were dose-specific… meaning that the benefits of increased life expectancy with sun exposure went up directly in correlation to the amount of sun exposure.
The verdict? Under-exposure to the sun is actually dangerous. Think of it this way, avoiding the sun is worse than smoking in terms of decreasing life expectancy. There are lots of things you can do to make spending time in the sun safer (you can read an article I wrote about that for you here: 6 Ways To Protect Your Skin While Enjoying That Summer Sun) and still decrease skin cancer risk while getting that beautiful, life affirming sunshine, the light exposure that helps to regulate our circadian rhythm, the healthy benefits of boosted Vitamin D levels, and hopefully, if you took to heart my anti-aging advice in #9, time spent grounding to our beautiful earth outside.
I hope you’ve enjoyed getting a brief update on all of the exciting new developments I’ve been enjoying watching unfold during my past several decades of practicing medicine. What was your favorite advancement and what new areas of research are you excited to learn more about?
I’ll be here to keep you updated as well, so we can all feel our very best in a natural, holistic way that is in concert with the health of our planet too. If someone was kind enough to forward this article to you, and you’d like to get my uplifting weekly articles into your inbox directly, you can sign up for my newsletter right here:
Xoxox,
Laura Koniver MD