Influenza kills an average of 36,000 people in the United States every winter. Flu vaccines are an effort to protect against this but are notoriously ineffective.

Recently the Vitamin D Council has published a paper entitled, “Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D” by Dr. John Cannell. In this article, Dr. Cannell and his colleagues propose that Vitamin D deficiency is the reason influenza is much more common in the winter than in the summer.

Vitamin D is the only vitamin made by the human body and for that reason it is called a Pro-Hormone. We need ultraviolet B radiation (UVB) from the sun, in order to allow the skin to manufacture Vitamin D for our body. In Northern climates, including most of the United States, we just don’t get enough sunshine and therefore not enough UVB to make adequate Vitamin D in the winter. In addition, ozone (for example, smog) blocks the UVB, so even those places like Southern California that are getting plenty of sunshine, have a reduced amount of UVB in the winter.

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The CT Angiogram is the latest in cardiac technological developments. Through new GE Lightspeed technology, with 64 bit computer processing, we are now for the first time able to perform an angiogram of the heart arteries without significantly invading the body!

What does it mean, and why is it important?

For years the gold standard for evaluating disease or plaque in the arteries of the heart, called coronary arteries, has been the angiogram. To do an angiogram, you are taken into an operating room at the hospital. An incision is made in your groin and a very long, approximately 36 inch catheter, is inserted into your groin up your aorta and into the heart arteries. Under x-ray fluoroscopy the doctor injects dyes through the catheter into your heart arteries and then takes Cine pictures. These pictures show plaque or blockage of the arteries and we can get an exact measurement of whether your arteries are completely open, 20% blocked, 50% blocked, 80% blocked, 95% blocked. Once an artery is over 90% blocked, there is significant risk for an immediate heart attack.

Because the traditional angiogram of this type is obviously very invasive and quite expensive, we have never been able to do this in a routine fashion.

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The purpose of this blog is to share with the world more information on Integrative Medicine (IM). I have been practicing Integrative Medicine for over 28 years. I am a board certified internist and integrate Diet, Nutrition, Acupuncture, Herbal medicine, and homeopathy into my traditional Internal Medicine practice in Beverly Hills. Because my patients over and over have told me how much they have benefited from this approach, and because I realize not everyone wants or can have an IM physician, I have created this blog to share some of the information that I give to my patients on a regular basis. The special areas that I will be discussing will include:

1. Integrative medicine subjects in the news
2. Environmental Medicine and its impact on human health.
3. Cutting edge testing that can help to prevent chronic diseases.
4. Cutting edge medical tests that can detect early disease.
5. Integrative Medicine Healing techniques.

I hope you will stay posted and learn things from my site that can have positive impact on your health and the health of your family.