In my sixteen years of family medicine, I think the most frustrating disease I treat is obesity. It’s frustrating because as a doctor I feel great compassion for these patients, trying so hard to lose weight, and yet I feel almost shameful that as a primary care physician I can’t offer much in terms of medicines to help.… Read the rest
Category Archives: Diabetes
Diabetes: Healthy Lifestyle Choices Are Key
I’ve been a family doctor for fifteen years, and one of the more dramatic changes I’ve noticed is a big spike in the incidence of prediabetes and diabetes, in all age groups. I had worked in China for ten years until last summer, and all us family doctors at my Beijing clinic weren’t surprised at all with the 2013 paper published in JAMA confirming the frightening reality in China: more than half of all adults in China now are prediabetic.… Read the rest
I Have Prediabetes: Now What?
If you are reading this, you or a loved one have probably been told by your doctor that you have abnormally high sugar levels. The doctor may have called it Impaired Fasting Glucose or Impaired Glucose Tolerance, but both of those are just fancy medical words for prediabetes.… Read the rest
Preventing Diabetes: Brown is Always Better Than White
As diabetes continues its pandemic across the world, it’s crucial that we all truly understand how we could prevent this very preventable disease — at least for type 2 diabetes, which is the adult-onset diabetes mostly related to obesity and the “Western” lifestyle.… Read the rest
Obesity and Diabetes: How Does Your Country Rank?
It’s no secret that obesity, and its twin sister disease of diabetes, have become epidemics of every modernizing country. I work in a family medicine clinic in China and am now witnessing firsthand the expanding waistlines of Chinese people, as they quickly adopt the “Western” diet.… Read the rest
Diabetes and Natural Supplements: Which Work? Which Don't?
What natural supplements and medicines work to prevent or lessen diabetes? We know that the Western-prescribed medicines such as insulin injections and metformin pills are extremely effective, but wouldn’t it be great, and much healthier for us, if we could focus on more natural therapies?… Read the rest