Contaminated drywall from China, used to build more than 60,000 homes in at least a dozen states, may be emitting toxic levels of chemical pollutants like sulfur into new homes.

More than 500 million pounds of potentially tainted Chinese building materials may have been imported into the United States, particularly to Florida, at the height of the housing boom, according to shipping records reviewed by The Associated Press (AP).

The drywall lets off fumes that smell like rotten eggs and are potent enough to corrode copper pipes and make jewelry and silverware turn black. In fact, one of the telltale signs that a home may contain Chinese drywall is corroded piping and wiring that causes electronics and appliances, including air conditioners, to fail.

Click here to read more.

What is your ideal target age to live to? Many people today live to and past 100. We all want to live a healthy life filled with happiness and no regrets.

We will share how to live your life healthier now and at a higher quality of life with less potential ill concerns for many more years to come.

We all have different reasons to live longer, but yet most end up the same: To spend more time with our children, grandchildren and loved ones. We nearly all have loving memories of our cherished grandparents, which we seek to have as many years as possible while in good health with those we too love so dearly.

Click here to read more.

Americans suffer from 1 billion colds a year, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. There are also nearly 32 million cases of chronic sinusitis reported by health care providers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year.

Simple and inexpensive nasal irrigation may help relieve painful sinus congestion for millions of Americans.

Among the top symptoms experienced by those suffering from the 1 billion colds a year include:

• Mucus buildup in your nose
• Difficulty breathing through your nose
• Swelling of your sinuses
• Headache

Click here to read more.

My article this week is not strictly medical. However, it is on a subject that is very important to all of us.

Even though we are all unique and special in our own ways, the robots are coming! The question is, will they steal our jobs?

With the technological developments of the last many years, computers have taken over many jobs already. Newspapers are mostly online now. Parking garages have machines that give you your ticket and take the money to pay for the ticket on your way out. Who makes typewriters now?

Audi has just been given the first permit to begin testing a driverless car.

I believe we should all be in dialogue about this subject now, before it becomes too late. There is a new phenomenon called technological unemployment that is pervading modern society.

A recently published book called *Robots will Steal Your Job, But That’s Ok*, by Frederico Pistono, looks at this subject and asks if this is really the case? Or is it just a fantasy? He discusses what will become of us in the coming years and what can we do to prevent catastrophic collapse of society, caused by this evolutionary change in the world.

In the book, he explores the impact of technological advances on our lives, and most importantly what it means to be happy, and provide suggestions for preventing trouble in the future.

What got me interested in the subject, is a webpage I accidentally landed on, when browsing the web! It contained a 15 minute video – which never lost my interest – on just what robots are capable of. I was quite surprised, by what is happening in our world with technology and robots.

I urge you to watch this video so that we may be in dialogue on the planet on how to sustain jobs for our future generations.

“Humans Need Not Apply”

The things in this video are already starting to become a reality. As I mentioned, Audi is already cleared to test a car that will drive without a driver. Hopefully, these changes will occur incrementally as robots and computers take away segments of the job market.

I am coming to find that several other books have been written on this subject already, over the last couple years. I list them below.

 Please drop me a note on Twitter or Facebook, and let me know what you think about this subject? Have robots affected your life yet? Have they affected a member of your family’s life yet? Do you know anybody who lost their job to to a robot or computer?

I hope to hear from you.

Best Doctors of LA

I want to thank all my patients and readers who dropped me emails congratulating me on being voted as one of the best doctors in Los Angeles. It was indeed a great honor to be selected to be the “centerfold” doctor for this article that appeared last week.

Thank you all again for your congratulations and best wishes.

If you missed the article from last week, you can click here to see the front page. You can click here to see my interview..

To your good health!

Remember to follow me on Twitter and Like me Facebook where you can leave me questions and comments.

Also remember to visit my Healthy Living Shop where you can get physician quality supplements for you health!

First time buyers can use the code VPP10FT for a one time discount of 10% (before shipping, handling and tax)

Wishing you the best of health!

Dr Soram

In a new study just published on August 27 in the journal Menopause, Phillip Sarrel, MD and colleagues have shown that moderate to severe hot flashes in menopausal women are not being treated in the majority of women. Women with hot flashes due to lack of hormonal replacement have many other symptoms in addition to just feeling hot. Other frequently occurring symptoms include fatigue, sleep disturbances, depression, anxiety and impaired short­term memory.

Dr. Sarrel, the lead author, is quoted as saying “Not treating these common symptoms causes many women to drop out of the labor force at a time when their careers are on the upswing…This also places demands on health care and drives up insurance costs.”

The researchers analyzed data on health insurance claims from over 500,000 women. Half of these women had hot flashes and the other half did not. All were insured by Fortune 500 companies.

The findings are startling. Women who experienced hot flashes had 1.5 million more healthcare visits than women without hot flashes. “Costs for the additional health care was $339,559,458. The cost of work lost was another $27,668,410 during the 12­ month study period.”

“Women are not mentioning it to their healthcare providers, and providers aren’t bringing it up,” said Sarrel.

“The symptoms can be easily treated in a variety of ways, such as with low­dose hormone patches, non­hormonal medications, and simple environmental adjustments such as cooling the workplace.”

From his comments I can see the Dr Sarrel is in agreement with me. Most, but not all, women in menopause will be significantly helped by bio identical hormone replacement therapy.

I want to remind all my readers and patients that the Women’s Health Initiative, which is the study that caused the reduction in the use of hormone replacement therapy was not reported correctly to us. The headlines did not indicate that the estrogen used in the study was from horses rather than human hormones. In addition the progesterone used in the study was not human progesterone, but was rather a pharmaceutically manufactured chemical that had progesterone – like effects.

With these startling statistics about women dropping out of the task force, please talk to your physicians about considering the use of bio identical hormone replacement when you or your loved one, goes into menopause.

Read the article HERE

And the original article here.

Remember to follow me on Twitter and Like me Facebook where you can leave me questions and comments.

Also remember to visit my Healthy Living Shop where you can get physician quality supplements for you health!

First time buyers can use the code VPP10FT for a one time discount of 10% (before shipping, handling and tax)

Wishing you the best of health!

Dr Soram

I have had a wellness oriented practice of medicine for over 30 years. My patients and readers all know that.

In the early 1980s I realized from evidence that was obvious in the medical literature even at that time, that smoking was bad for one’s health. I believed that anyone who is coming to me saying they wanted to improve their health, who was still smoking, was lying to themselves.

For that reason, I stopped seeing any new patients who were smoking. Over the years patients with significant health problems quit smoking, so that they could come and visit with me to begin using integrative medicine to improve their health.

Over the last decade now, the evils of smoking that were obvious to me and other physicians in the early 1980s have come to the forefront. Finally, after decades, the government has supported efforts to help people quit smoking.

“The U.S. Surgeon General and other public health authorities around the world have found that smoking damages nearly every organ in the human body and harms health at every stage of life. Yet we are continually learning new ways in which smoking harms health.

In the latest example, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Alzheimer’s Disease International are reporting, based on a review of scientific studies, that smokers have a 45 percent higher risk of developing dementia compared to non­smokers. ”

This is an astonishing large percentage increase in a devastating disease just from smoking cigarettes.

My only question is “what took them so long?”

If you have a friend or relative who is still smoking, please ask them to quit!

Read the original article here.

And more HERE

Massive egg recalls in past years, prompted by thousands of cases of Salmonella poisoning, is now safely behind us, but there are still foods lurking in your supermarket that have the potential to make you sick.

Food-borne diseases cause an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In all, about 200 diseases can be transmitted through food, including via viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins, metals and prions. Most deadly, however, are bacteria, which account for 72 percent of food-related deaths, followed by parasites (21 percent), and viruses (7 percent). And though there are countless organisms that can make you ill, just five pathogens are responsible for 90 percent of food-related deaths each year. These include:

1. Salmonella (31 percent)
2. Listeria (28 percent)
3. Toxoplasma (21 percent)
4. Norwalk-like viruses (7 percent)
5. Campylobacter (5 percent)

Click here to find out more.

“Sleeping on it” has long been one of the best pieces of advice when faced with a difficult decision or a complex problem. A good night’s sleep has a way of helping us sort through our options and identify solutions that were invisible to us the day before.

Exactly how sleep works its problem-solving magic is more of a mystery, but it’s well known that getting enough high-quality sleep can improve your memory. Further, when you learn a new skill, the memories are vulnerable until they are “solidified” in your brain. It appears that sleeping plays a key role in this process, which may explain why infants, who are constantly learning new skills, require so much more sleep than adults.

But new research is revealing there’s another part of sleep that also makes a mark on your brain, and its ability to solve problems, and that is your dreams.

Click here to read more.