Diseases & Conditions Related Articles & Blog Posts

Becoming an Alzheimer’s Researcher: My Journey In 2009, someone at the Build a Bear Workshop heard about my project and invited me to apply to become one of their huggable heroes.  As a Huggable Hero, I was invited to St. Louis for an amazing experience.  That’s where I met some very inspirational young people, many [...]

When I was very young I was invited to participate in a Davidson Young Scholar conference at Lake Tahoe.  There were about 20 Davidson Young Scholars and their families at the event. We stayed in a hotel up in Tahoe.  I remember the sign as we entered the hotel building, “Don’t leave the doors open.  [...]

Because my family kept Great Grams at home with us, instead of in a nursing home, I was confronted daily with her needs. I kept thinking about and reading about Alzheimer’s disease.  It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I wanted to spend my life helping Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. From age [...]

During the last year of her life, my great grandmother spent time going in and out of several hospital dementia wards, most often for the urinary tract infections that so often accompany incontinence.  Upon visiting her in these settings, I noticed that patients who were working on jigsaw puzzles seemed calmer than their frequently agitated [...]

I was still very young when I first decided to pursue a career in medicine.  My early experiences helped me grasp the importance of what I might accomplish if I could succeed at practicing medicine with compassion.  I can still recall, at the age of nine, with sleepy eyes, taking my post for the night.  [...]

There is mounting evidence that vitamin D plays an important role in reducing risk of developing cardiovascular disease as well as the diseases that often precede it such as diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease. The category cardiovascular disease includes coronary heart disease (heart attack), stroke, peripheral arterial disease, and congestive heart failure. Several observational [...]

I don’t recall ever hearing of it when I was growing up, but today celiac disease is nearly epidemic. Once considered a rare autoimmune disorder, celiac disease now affects 1 out of every 133 Americans, a ratio that may be even higher if you include wheat and gluten allergies and sensitivities that are not diagnosed [...]

Accept and Embrace The Challenge. By acceptance, I do NOT mean loving it. I hate autism for stealing my son’s childhood. But I am not in denial, because denial kept me from walking a path I ultimately needed to walk. Without the challenges that life gives us, how do we find out what we are [...]

3 year old foreskin is tight and his doctor wants to prescribe cream to loosen it. I have been trying to research as much as possible if I should even put this cream on my child, which is…

Our home life is in shatters. My husband and I desperately search for answers to help our 3-year-old autistic son. One day I open the newspaper and see a conference advertised in the area called DAN – Defeat Autism Now. One of the first presenters is a beautiful woman named Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, lecturing on [...]