11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright

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If hips don’t lie, what are yours saying to you? If what they’re saying to you sounds like a cry for help sometimes, this is the book to get you onto a better track.

The hip is the largest joint in your body, and it bears a lot of weight. So it’s little wonder if sometimes they’d like a word with the boss. The question is: what will you do about it? Melinda Wright has suggestions to keep your hips—and you—happy.

She spends the first couple of chapters introducing key concepts, and some anatomy and physiology that’ll be good to know.

Then we’re into resistance stretching, basic hip exercises, all the way through to more advanced stuff. There are very clear photos for each. One thing that stands out about this book is each exercise is not just explained simply and clearly, but also offers “easing oneself in” exercises. After all, we’re not all at the same starting point.

The book finishes off with some more holistic advice about chronic pain management, based on her personal experience with scoliosis, and some dietary tips to reduce joint pain and inflammation too.

All in all, a very helpful book!

Pick up 11 “Minutes to Pain-Free Hips” at Amazon today!

^You will also see options for pain-free back, and pain-free neck, by the same author

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  • Can Medical Schools Funnel More Doctors Into the Primary Care Pipeline?

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    Throughout her childhood, Julia Lo Cascio dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. So, when applying to medical school, she was thrilled to discover a new, small school founded specifically to train primary care doctors: NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine.

    Now in her final year at the Mineola, New York, school, Lo Cascio remains committed to primary care pediatrics. But many young doctors choose otherwise as they leave medical school for their residencies. In 2024, 252 of the nation’s 3,139 pediatric residency slots went unfilled and family medicine programs faced 636 vacant residencies out of 5,231 as students chased higher-paying specialties.

    Lo Cascio, 24, said her three-year accelerated program nurtured her goal of becoming a pediatrician. Could other medical schools do more to promote primary care? The question could not be more urgent. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 20,200 to 40,400 primary care doctors by 2036. This means many Americans will lose out on the benefits of primary care, which research shows improves health, leading to fewer hospital visits and less chronic illness.

    Many medical students start out expressing interest in primary care. Then they end up at schools based in academic medical centers, where students become enthralled by complex cases in hospitals, while witnessing little primary care.

    The driving force is often money, said Andrew Bazemore, a physician and a senior vice president at the American Board of Family Medicine. “Subspecialties tend to generate a lot of wealth, not only for the individual specialists, but for the whole system in the hospital,” he said.

    A department’s cache of federal and pharmaceutical-company grants often determines its size and prestige, he said. And at least 12 medical schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, don’t even have full-fledged family medicine departments. Students at these schools can study internal medicine, but many of those graduates end up choosing subspecialties like gastroenterology or cardiology.

    One potential solution: eliminate tuition, in the hope that debt-free students will base their career choice on passion rather than paycheck. In 2024, two elite medical schools — the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — announced that charitable donations are enabling them to waive tuition, joining a handful of other tuition-free schools.

    But the contrast between the school Lo Cascio attends and the institution that founded it starkly illustrates the limitations of this approach. Neither charges tuition.

    In 2024, two-thirds of students graduating from her Long Island school chose residencies in primary care. Lo Cascio said the tuition waiver wasn’t a deciding factor in choosing pediatrics, among the lowest-paid specialties, with an average annual income of $260,000, according to Medscape.

    At the sister school, the Manhattan-based NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the majority of its 2024 graduates chose specialties like orthopedics (averaging $558,000 a year) or dermatology ($479,000).

    Primary care typically gets little respect. Professors and peers alike admonish students: If you’re so smart, why would you choose primary care? Anand Chukka, 27, said he has heard that refrain regularly throughout his years as a student at Harvard Medical School. Even his parents, both PhD scientists, wondered if he was wasting his education by pursuing primary care.

    Seemingly minor issues can influence students’ decisions, Chukka said. He recalls envying the students on hospital rotations who routinely were served lunch, while those in primary care settings had to fetch their own.

    Despite such headwinds, Chukka, now in his final year, remains enthusiastic about primary care. He has long wanted to care for poor and other underserved people, and a one-year clerkship at a community practice serving low-income patients reinforced that plan.

    When students look to the future, especially if they haven’t had such exposure, primary care can seem grim, burdened with time-consuming administrative tasks, such as seeking prior authorizations from insurers and grappling with electronic medical records.

    While specialists may also face bureaucracy, primary care practices have it much worse: They have more patients and less money to hire help amid burgeoning paperwork requirements, said Caroline Richardson, chair of family medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.

    “It’s not the medical schools that are the problem; it’s the job,” Richardson said. “The job is too toxic.”

    Kevin Grumbach, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, spent decades trying to boost the share of students choosing primary care, only to conclude: “There’s really very little that we can do in medical school to change people’s career trajectories.”

    Instead, he said, the U.S. health care system must address the low pay and lack of support.

    And yet, some schools find a way to produce significant proportions of primary care doctors — through recruitment and programs that provide positive experiences and mentors.

    U.S. News & World Report recently ranked 168 medical schools by the percentage of graduates who were practicing primary care six to eight years after graduation.

    The top 10 schools are all osteopathic medical schools, with 41% to 47% of their students still practicing primary care. Unlike allopathic medical schools, which award MD degrees, osteopathic schools, which award DO degrees, have a history of focusing on primary care and are graduating a growing share of the nation’s primary care physicians.

    At the bottom of the U.S. News list is Yale, with 10.7% of its graduates finding lasting careers in primary care. Other elite schools have similar rates: Johns Hopkins, 13.1%; Harvard, 13.7%.

    In contrast, public universities that have made it a mission to promote primary care have much higher numbers.

    The University of Washington — No. 18 in the ranking, with 36.9% of graduates working in primary care — has a decades-old program placing students in remote parts of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. UW recruits students from those areas, and many go back to practice there, with more than 20% of graduates settling in rural communities, according to Joshua Jauregui, assistant dean for clinical curriculum.

    Likewise, the University of California-Davis (No. 22, with 36.3% of graduates in primary care) increased the percentage of students choosing family medicine from 12% in 2009 to 18% in 2023, even as it ranks high in specialty training. Programs such as an accelerated three-year primary care “pathway,” which enrolls primarily first-generation college students, help sustain interest in non-specialty medical fields.

    The effort starts with recruitment, looking beyond test scores to the life experiences that forge the compassionate, humanistic doctors most needed in primary care, said Mark Henderson, associate dean for admissions and outreach. Most of the students have families who struggle to get primary care, he said. “So they care a lot about it, and it’s not just an intellectual, abstract sense.”

    Establishing schools dedicated to primary care, like the one on Long Island, is not a solution in the eyes of some advocates, who consider primary care the backbone of medicine and not a separate discipline. Toyese Oyeyemi Jr., executive director of the Social Mission Alliance at the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute of Health Workforce Equity, worries that establishing such schools might let others “off the hook.”

    Still, attending a medical school created to produce primary care doctors worked out well for Lo Cascio. Although she underwent the usual specialty rotations, her passion for pediatrics never flagged — owing to her 23 classmates, two mentors, and her first-year clerkship shadowing a community pediatrician. Now, she’s applying for pediatric residencies.

    Lo Cascio also has deep personal reasons: Throughout her experience with a congenital heart condition, her pediatrician was a “guiding light.”

    “No matter what else has happened in school, in life, in the world, and medically, your pediatrician is the person that you can come back to,” she said. “What a beautiful opportunity it would be to be that for someone else.”

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Vibration Plate, Review After 6 Months: Is It Worth It?

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    Is it push-button exercise, or an expensive fad, or something else entirely? Robin, from “The Science of Self-Care”, has insights:

    Science & Experience

    According to the science (studies cited in the video and linked-to in the video description, underneath it on YouTube), vibration therapy does have some clear benefits, namely:

    • Bone health (helps with bone density, particularly beneficial for postmenopausal women)
    • Muscle recovery (reduces lactate levels, aiding faster recovery)
    • Joint health (reduces pain and improves function in osteoarthritis patients)
    • Muscle stimulation (helps older adults maintain muscle mass)
    • Cognitive function (due to increased blood flow to the brain)

    And from her personal experience, the benefits included:

    • Improved recovery after exercise, reducing muscle soreness and stiffness
    • Reduced back pain and improved posture (not surprising, given the need for stabilizing muscles when using one of these)
    • Better circulation and (likely resulting from same) skin clarity

    She did not, however, notice:

    • Any reduction in cellulite
    • Any change in body composition (fat loss or muscle gain)

    For a deeper look into these things and more, plus a demonstration of how the machine actually operates, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

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    Take care!

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  • No, you don’t need the ‘Barbie drug’ to tan, whatever TikTok says. Here’s why melanotan-II is so risky

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    TikTok and Instagram influencers have been peddling the “Barbie drug” to help you tan.

    But melanotan-II, as it’s called officially, is a solution that’s too good to be true. Just like tanning, this unapproved drug has a dark side.

    Doctors, researchers and Australia’s drug regulator have been warning about its side effects – from nausea and vomiting to brain swelling and erection problems.

    There are also safer ways of getting the tanned look, if that’s what you’re after.

    AtlasStudio/Shutterstock

    What is melanotan-II?

    No, it’s not a typo. Melanotan-II is very different from melatonin, which is a hormonal supplement used for insomnia and jet lag.

    Melanotan-II is a synthetic version of the naturally ocurring hormone α-melanocyte stimulating hormone. This means the drug mimics the body’s hormone that stimulates production of the pigment melanin. This is what promotes skin darkening or tanning, even in people with little melanin.

    Although the drug is promoted as a way of getting a “sunless tan”, it is usually promoted for use with UV exposure, to enhance the effect of UV and kickstart the tanning process.

    Melanotan-II is related to, but different from, melanotan-I (afamelanotide), an approved drug used to treat the skin condition erythropoietic protoporphyria.

    Melanotan-II is not registered for use with Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). It is illegal to advertise it to the public or to provide it without a prescription.

    However, social media has been driving unlicensed melanotan-II sales, a study published last year confirms.

    There are many black market suppliers of melanotan-II injections, tablets and creams. More recently, nasal sprays have become more popular.

    What are the risks?

    Just like any drug, melanotan-II comes with the risk of side effects, many of which we’ve known about for more than a decade. These include changes in the size and pigmentation of moles, rapid appearance of new moles, flushing to the face, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, chest pain and brain swelling.

    It can also cause rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous syndrome where muscle breaks down and releases proteins into the bloodstream that damage the kidneys.

    For men, the drug can cause priapism – a painful erection that does not go away and can damage the penis, requiring emergency treatment.

    Its use has been linked with melanoma developing from existing moles either during or shortly after using the drug. This is thought to be due to stimulating pigment cells and causing the proliferation of abnormal cells.

    Despite reports of melanoma, according to a study of social media posts the drug is often marketed as protecting against skin cancer. In fact, there’s no evidence to show it does this.

    Social media posts about melanotan-II rarely mention health risks.

    There are no studies on long-term safety of melanotan-II use.

    Then there’s the issue of the drug not held to the high safety standards as TGA-approved products. This could result in variability in dose, undeclared ingredients and potential microbial contamination.

    Young, pale man walking along street, looking down at phone in hand
    Thinking about melanotan-II? The drug can cause a long-lasting painful erection needing urgent medical care. Eugenio Marongiu/Shutterstock

    The TGA has previously warned consumers to steer clear of the drug due to its “serious side effects that can be very damaging to your health”.

    According to an ABC article published earlier this week, the TGA is cracking down on the illegal promotion of the drug on various websites. However, we know banned sellers can pop back up under a different name.

    TikTok has banned the hashtags #tanningnasalspray, #melanotan and #melanotan2, but these products continue to be promoted with more generic hashtags, such as #tanning.

    Part of a wider trend

    Australia has some of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. The “slip, slop, slap” campaign is a public health success story, with increased awareness of sun safety, a cultural shift and a decline in melanoma in young people.

    However, the image of a bronzed beach body remains a beauty standard, especially among some young people.

    Disturbingly, tan lines are trending on TikTok as a sought after summer accessory and the hashtag #sunburnttanlines has millions of views. We’ve also seen a backlash against sunscreen among some young people, again promoted on TikTok.

    The Cancer Council is so concerned about the trend towards normalising tanning it has launched the campaign End the Trend.

    You have other options

    There are options beyond spraying an illegal, unregulated product up your nose, or risking unprotected sun exposure: fake tan.

    Fake tan tends to be much safer than melanotan-II and there’s more long-term safety data. It also comes with potential side effects, albeit rare ones, including breathing issues (with spray products) and skin inflammation in some people.

    Better still, you can embrace your natural skin tone.

    Rose Cairns, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, University of Sydney

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Come As You Are – by Dr. Emily Nagoski
  • Hormones & Health, Beyond The Obvious

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    Wholesome Health

    This is Dr. Sara Gottfried, who some decades ago got her MD from Harvard and specialized as an OB/GYN at MIT. She’s since then spent the more recent part of her career educating people (mostly: women) about hormonal health, precision, functional, & integrative medicine, and the importance of lifestyle medicine in general.

    What does she want us to know?

    Beyond “bikini zone health”

    Dr. Gottfried urges us to pay attention to our whole health, in context.

    “Women’s health” is often thought of as what lies beneath a bikini, and if it’s not in those places, then we can basically treat a woman like a man.

    And that’s often not actually true—because hormones affect every living cell in our body, and as a result, while prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women (specifically, those who are not on HRT) may share a few more similarities with boys and men of similar respective ages, for most people at most ages, men and women are by default quite different metabolically—which is what counts for a lot of diseases! And note, that difference is not just “faster” or “slower””, but is often very different in manner also.

    That’s why, even in cases where incidence of disease is approximately similar in men and women when other factors are controlled for (age, lifestyle, medical history, etc), the disease course and response to treatment may vary considerable. For a strong example of this, see for example:

    • The well-known: Heart Attack: His & Hers ← most people know these differences exist, but it’s always good to brush up on what they actually are
    • The less-known: Statins: His & Hers ← most people don’t know these differences exist, and it pays to know, especially if you are a woman or care about one

    Nor are brains exempt from his…

    The female brain (kinda)

    While the notion of an anatomically different brain for men and women has long since been thrown out as unscientific phrenology, and the idea of a genetically different brain is… Well, it’s an unreliable indicator, because technically the cells will have DNA and that DNA will usually (but not always; there are other options) have XX or XY chromosomes, which will usually (but again, not always) match apparent sex (in about 1/2000 cases there’s a mismatch, which is more common than, say, red hair; sometimes people find out about a chromosomal mismatch only later in life when getting a DNA test for some unrelated reason), and in any case, even for most of us, the chromosomal differences don’t count for much outside of antenatal development (telling the default genital materials which genitals to develop into, though this too can get diverted, per many intersex possibilities, which is also a lot more common than people think) or chromosome-specific conditions like colorblindness…

    The notion of a hormonally different brain is, in contrast to all of the above, a reliable and easily verifiable thing.

    See for example:

    Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear

    Dr. Gottfried urges us to take the above seriously!

    Because, if women get Alzheimer’s much more commonly than men, and the disease progresses much more quickly in women than men, but that’s based on postmenopausal women not on HRT, then that’s saying “Women, without women’s usual hormones, don’t do so well as men with men’s usual hormones”.

    She does, by the way, advocate for bioidentical HRT for menopausal women, unless contraindicated for some important reason that your doctor/endocrinologist knows about. See also:

    Menopausal HRT: A Tale Of Two Approaches (Bioidentical vs Animal)

    The other very relevant hormone

    …that Dr. Gottfried wants us to pay attention to is insulin.

    Or rather, its scrubbing enzyme, the prosaically-named “insulin-degrading enzyme”, but it doesn’t only scrub insulin. It also scrubs amyloid beta—yes, the same that produces the amyloid beta plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s. And, there’s only so much insulin-degrading enzyme to go around, and if it’s all busy breaking down excess insulin, there’s not enough left to do the other job too, and thus can’t break down amyloid beta.

    In other words: to fight neurodegeneration, keep your blood sugars healthy.

    This may actually work by multiple mechanisms besides the amyloid hypothesis, by the way:

    The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s

    Want more from Dr. Gottfried?

    You might like this interview with Dr. Gottfried by Dr. Benson at the IMCJ:

    Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal | Conversations with Sara Gottfried, MD

    …in which she discusses some of the things we talked about today, and also about her shift from a pharmaceutical-heavy approach to a predominantly lifestyle medicine approach.

    Enjoy!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Everything You Need To Know About The Menopause – by Kate Muir

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Kate Muir has made a career out of fighting for peri-menopausal health to be taken seriously. Because… it’s actually far more serious than most people know.

    What people usually know:

    • No more periods
    • Hot flushes
    • “I dunno, some annoying facial hairs maybe”

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    • Workplace struggles (completely unnecessary ones)
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    Grab your copy of “Everything You Need To Know About The Menopause” from Amazon today!

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  • Successful Aging – by Dr. Daniel Levitin

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    We all know about age-related cognitive decline. What if there’s a flipside, though?

    Neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin explores the changes that the brain undergoes with age, and notes that it’s not all downhill.

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    Bottom line: if you want to get the most out of your aging wizening brain, this book is a great how-to manual.

    Click here to check out Successful Aging and level up your later years!

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