Medical Mondays

Some of my patients ask me about a phenomenon called "leaky gut". There really is such a thing. What this means - and it's kind of complicated, but I'll break it down pretty simple - what can happen and especially in reaction to eating certain foods, there can be microscopic inflammation that happens in the lining in the gut.

Hello. My name is Dr. Keith Wharton and I'm the medical director of BodyLogicMD of Pittsburgh. A question I frequently get in my practice is how long does menopause usually last? The answer is it usually lasts 1-5 years but can last longer. The good news is treatments are available.

I see many patients that have problems with depression or mood swings. Often, these are women who have had hysterectomies or have been tried on antidepressant medications without any relief. These mood issues are often due to estrogen, progesterone, testosterone or adrenal hormone imbalances.

Today we're going to talk about omega-3s. It's a very popular topic. It's a very common supplement. So, when we talk about omega-3s, I like patients to realize, first of all, that we have different qualities of supplements that are available to the public. We like to call them pharmaceutical grade or nutriceuticals.

Father's Day is coming up in June, as is National Men's Health Week and, as a middle-aged man, I've noticed a lot of things. One of the things men do in their middle age is they stop taking care of themselves. They stop eating healthy, stop exercising and start putting on the gut.

A lot of my patients ask me about osteoporosis and the role that bioidentical hormones play in preventing and/or helping osteoporosis - and they really do. For instance, estradiol, which is a type of estrogen, prevents further bone loss. So you have estrogen preventing bone loss. And then progesterone actually helps lay down bone.

I work with peoples? hormones every day and people really don't understand what hormones are a lot of times. They think they know what hormones are, but I want to tell you a little more about how the hormones work in our body. Hormones are our body's chemical messengers and they send messages from one place to another.

When a person comes in feeling poorly, and we do their hormone analysis and get them on a hormone balancing regimen that gets them feeling better and their body functioning better, things can happen in the body that are actually healing in sort of as a side benefit to what we're actually doing with the hormones.