It’s a scientific fact that disease starts at the cellular level. Cancer and tumors are the result of abnormal cell division. Inflammation inside an artery that creates plaque is caused by unhealthy cells. How you feel and function is determined by the health of the 20-30 trillion cells in the human body. This is why […]

I often tell the story about my time as a pre-med student when I began seeing the connections between what I learned in nutrition, exercise science, biology, and chemistry classes. This led me to study and become passionate about functional medicine. Since I began my career in clinical practice and as a public speaker more […]

There’s a reason why the Pyramid of Health is displayed so prominently at Natural Healthcare Center. I wrote the Pyramid of Health and created this model from top to bottom as an illustration of how I think in clinical practice, and how our entire team approaches healthcare. We all share the same Goal – to […]

Bursitis is a condition often associated with athletes. A tennis player with tennis elbow. A baseball player with shoulder bursitis. A soccer player or runner with hip or knee bursitis. Bursitis is definitely common in sports. However, bursitis is a condition that happens to everyday people performing everyday activities, from gardening and cleaning, to installing […]

As I prepared my presentation for seventh and eighth graders at Long Branch Middle School as part of a WEForum health education event, I went through some serious reflection and creative thinking. On one hand, if you had told me as a student in the late 1980s and early 1990s that we would have created […]

It’s not uncommon for people to chalk up poor health to genetics. Occurrences of heart disease, stroke, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer’s and other conditions are often viewed as inevitable by people with a family history of those conditions. It runs in the family. The fact is, chronic illness is far more likely to be caused by […]

Behavioral economics kind of flies in the face of the traditional economics approach. This rational choice model is based on the notion that rational people make sound judgments by weighing costs, pros and cons. They have the self-control to stay on the right path to achieving their goals. I wish this was true, but it’s […]

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opioids were involved in 33,091 deaths in 2015. From 1999 to 2015, the number of opioid overdoses quadrupled. In New Jersey, the number of opioid overdose deaths increased by 16.4 percent from 2014 to 2015. The vast majority of these cases resulted from the abuse […]

In an earlier post, I discussed why the conversation about health care reform needs to change. We need to talk less about health insurance and more about making people healthier. We need to prioritize proactive disease prevention rather than reactive disease treatment if we’re ever going to reverse the chronic illness epidemic in our country […]

It happened again in Washington. After spending seven years pointing fingers and the past few weeks trying to craft legislation that would appease various political factions, our elected officials failed in their attempt at “health care reform.” That’s in quotes because the American Health Care Act, much like the Affordable Care Act, had little to […]