Teeming with life and full of bubbly deliciousness, sauerkraut is digestive vigor in a jar. Cheap to make and easy to prepare, one head of cabbage yields about a quart of sauerkraut and trillions of beneficial bacteria to supplement your gut flora. In addition, cabbage is high in the amino acid glutamine which is the […]
Category: Uncategorized
Going Against the Grain: Our Baby’s First Foods
Followers of the Cheap Medicine Blog know that one of the cornerstones of vibrant health is access to and consumption of whole nutrient-dense foods. It should come as no surprise then that choosing the first foods for our baby daughter would be going against the grain – literally and figuratively. Most Moms and Dads of […]
Osteoarthritis Part 1: Wear, Tear and No Repair
One of the most common and debilitating conditions is late-stage arthritis. Osteoarthritis is defined as a degeneration of the joints causing stiffness, pain, and deformity and is differentiated from rheumatoid arthritis (an autoimmune type) and psoriatic arthritis (which occurs alongside the skin condition psoriasis). Osteoarthritis itself can further be broken down into several distinct disease […]
Heat or Ice?
One item of contention between practitioners of Western and Eastern medicine is whether to use heat or ice on an area of pain. Whether the pain be acute or chronic, the standard line from most chiropractors, physical therapists, and doctors is to put ice on the affected area. We are told that cold reduces swelling […]
Osteoarthritis Part 2: A Crisis of Calcium
In the last post we covered the inflammatory and degenerative links to arthritis. These fundamental causes exist to a greater or lesser degree in every case of chronic arthritic pain and require individualized treatment strategies, the options for which will be covered in the last part of this series. Now we turn our attention to […]
Hydrating Yourself to Death
We have been told that we are mostly made up of water and that we should drink a minimum of 64 ounces a day to maintain hydration; perhaps more if we are active and sweat a lot. Being a skeptic of standardized recommendations that negate our body’s wisdom and its numerous means to communicate to […]
Osteoarthritis Part 3: Treating the Root Cause
In the last two posts we viewed osteoarthritis through the lens of inflammation, poor circulation, and calcification as dominant and overlapping disease processes. A genetic predisposition (family history) or arthritis can accentuate these causes, but like most all chronic disease, it takes lifestyle and environmental factors to express arthritis in its most painful and debilitating […]
Battle of the Bulge: Our Pets Now Too?
The rise of obesity in our pets has paralleled the obesity epidemic in people. Considering obesity is rare in nature, we must seriously question how and what we feed our furry friends to ensure they are nourished with a diet that allows them to live to their fullest potential. Whenever I am invited to lecture […]
Choosing the Best Nutritional Supplements
When it comes to optimum health and wellness, a diet rich in nutrient-dense foods is an absolute cornerstone. In a perfect world we would all eat plant foods that were organic and locally grown and animal foods that were pastured and ethically raised. The seeds for our vegetables would come from heirloom varieties, and our […]
Three Kinds of Pain
Pain is a sensory phenomena. Irrespective of its cause, pain is a message, mediated by the nervous system to relay information about the state of the body. Simply put, pain is the body’s way of communicating to us that something is wrong. Since your body doesn’t speak english (or any other language for that matter) […]