Book Review: The Breakthrough Depression Solution
James Greenblatt, a local psychiatrist practicing in Waltham, MA gives special attention to the role nutrition can play in mental illness.
He works with both adults and children and, though fully prepared to prescribe medications when useful, he also points to the statistics showing the limited effectiveness of such drugs. In the last twenty years the number of Americans on psychiatric disability leave has trebled. What’s wrong with this picture?
By James Greenblatt, MD
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
A Personalized 9-Step Method for Beating the Physical Causes of Your Depression
James Greenblatt, a local psychiatrist practicing in Waltham, MA gives special attention to the role nutrition can play in mental illness.
He works with both adults and children and, though fully prepared to prescribe medications when useful, he also points to the statistics showing the limited effectiveness of such drugs. In the last twenty years the number of Americans on psychiatric disability leave has trebled. What’s wrong with this picture?
Book Review: AN EPIDEMIC OF ABSENCE
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a journalist – a science writer primarily — who has taken on the job of translating an ambitious scope of research for the non-medical reader. The central thesis is that we evolved with parasites, mostly insects and worms, and without their stimulus our immune systems get restless and look for targets that often end up being some part of ourselves. This sort of ‘friendly fire’ becomes allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases. It’s important to point out that the many examples in the book are based on correlation, not causality. The correlations are indeed compelling, however. One, for instance, is that mothers who live on farms with animals have children with less asthma and fewer allergies. Another correlation links the end of malaria in Sardinia to a rapid rise in two autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis and type-1 diabetes. This book is dense with such examples.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a journalist – a science writer primarily — who has taken on the job of translating an ambitious scope of research for the non-medical reader. The central thesis is that we evolved with parasites, mostly insects and worms, and without their stimulus our immune systems get restless and look for targets that often end up being some part of ourselves. This sort of ‘friendly fire’ becomes allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases. It’s important to point out that the many examples in the book are based on correlation, not causality. The correlations are indeed compelling, however. One, for instance, is that mothers who live on farms with animals have children with less asthma and fewer allergies. Another correlation links the end of malaria in Sardinia to a rapid rise in two autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis and type-1 diabetes. This book is dense with such examples.
It is a book built on the premise that such immune-mediated disorders “arise in direct proportion to affluence and Westernization.” We no longer live in the kind of environment that we – including our immune systems – evolved to expect. And that leads to problems: allergies, asthma, autism and autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and nearly a hundred others. Why is this? The author, a sufferer from both allergy and alopecia (his immune system attacked his hair follicles when he was a boy so he has been bald since then) has done a very extensive search for the answer to that question and believes that “…much of our immune system evolved precisely to manage the problem of parasites.” That being so, those parasites aren’t really dispensable and are, in fact, even symbiotic, what he calls ‘mutualists.’ They need us and we need them. The result is a delicate balance for the immune system in which force to control the invaders must not become so much force as to destroy the self. He even claims that “parasites more than any other factor (diet, climate) have influenced our evolution.” In short, we are their creatures, not the other way around!
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Book Review: COULD IT BE B-12? An Epidemic of Misdiagnoses
By Sally M. Pacholok & Jeffrey Stuart
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
“Epidemic of Misdiagnoses,” the subtitle of this book, sounds like hyperbole. But to some of those who have been misdiagnosed it may, on the contrary, seem tame, especially if psychotic or demented or paralyzed from nerve damage because the lack of vitamin B-12 was not noticed by their doctors. Similarly, wouldn’t a parent whose aloof and silent toddler is labeled autistic – instead of being cured with B-12 injections — find that subtitle reasonable? So think the authors of this book.
Vitamin B-12 is essential to the human diet because we don’t manufacture it but we need it. B-12 is functionally diverse, playing a significant role in the nervous, cardio-vascular, gastric, immune and mental systems.
Who is at risk for B-12 deficiency? Vegans and those who avoid animal products; people who take pills to suppress stomach acid; people with intestinal or other problems that interfere with B-12 absorption; and people whose dentist has used laughing gas instead of Novocain. There are also some with a genetic anomaly that gives them pernicious anemia, the name of the blood disorder, which results from B-12 deficiency.
Book Review: Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life
By Paul & Shou-Ching Jaminet, YinYang Press, 2010
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
If you’re interested in the so-called “paleo diet” or if you’re interested in knowing why we might benefit from eating as our distant ancestors did, those ancestors who evolved before the development of agriculture, then this book will interest you. Even if you feel perfectly healthy on another regime, you might well be interested in reading in these pages about ways to combat disease through diet.
By Paul & Shou-Ching Jaminet, YinYang Press, 2010
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
If you’re interested in the so-called “paleo diet” or if you’re interested in knowing why we might benefit from eating as our distant ancestors did, those ancestors who evolved before the development of agriculture, then this book will interest you. Even if you feel perfectly healthy on another regime, you might well be interested in reading in these pages about ways to combat disease through diet.
Book Review: Minimally Invasive Dentistry – How to Reverse Tooth Decay
Cure Tooth Decay By Ramiel Nagel
Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye By Ellie Phillips, DDS
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye and Cure Tooth Decay are two books singing in the same choir but not quite harmonizing.
Both authors believe in minimally invasive dentistry, relying on prevention and on the re-mineralization of teeth. Re-mineralization is the good news! The self-repair of teeth is an alternative to drilling and filling. The authors disagree, however, on several topics: the use of fluoride, the use of xylitol, and whether bacteria cause tooth decay.
Book Review: The Acid Alkaline Balance Diet
By Felicia Drury Kliment
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
A Yin-Yang-pH Approach to Health and Disease
If you’ve heard that the acid/alkaline balance in your body might be important for your health and want to know why, this is a good book to read. The presentation is comprehensible, clear but not overly technical for the lay reader. Handy summaries of the author’s recommendations for each ailment make this a useful reference book as well as an explanatory text.
Book Review: The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer: One Solution to the Medical Enigma of Our Time
By Nicholas Gonzalez, MD, and Linda Isaacs, MD
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
An Intriguing Approach to Cancer and How to Treat It
Where does cancer come from? What’s going on in our bodies when we get cancer? This intriguing, seriously researched book offers a plausible – but unorthodox – explanation for at least the 90% of cancers. These are the tumors that initiate in the epithelium, the lining of our organs and glands. Researchers have long puzzled over why healthy somatic cells should, or could, become malignant. Drs. Gonzalez and Isaacs propose that it is stem cells that go awry, stem cells that in being pluripotential, or “invested with full power,” can become anything.
Book Review: Food and Mood for 2009
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
Let’s face it— we’d all like to eat something to brighten our mood…..and it doesn’t at all brighten our mood to hear that we should cut out sugar, though many in the field of nutrition agree that added sugar in any consistent quantity is ultimately a depressant.
Sugar, when first consumed, picks you right up, as digestion turns dietary sugar into blood glucose, which fires the brain. But then the pancreas responds with insulin to bring the blood glucose into healthy bounds, whereupon your mood droops – and you get a little fatter into the bargain. In fact, too much sugar is rather like an economic bubble. It feels great at first but “Buyer, beware!”
Book Review: IBS-Free At Last!
By Patsy Catsos
Reviewed by Rosalind Michahelles, Certified Holistic Health Counselor
A Useful Book about How to Avoid Irritable Bowel Syndrome
IBS – Irritable Bowel Syndrome – torments many people. Some have figured out that certain kinds of food produce distress in the form of bloating, gas, diarrhea, or constipation. Trial and error is probably the best way to learn these lessons; however, I found it very interesting that researchers in Australia have grouped the different fermentable sugars, which they consider the probably culprits, and have dubbed them FODMAPS for “fermentable oligo, di- and mono-saccharides and polyols.”
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