Back To Basics By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Call me "old fashioned," but there are some things in life, which just stand the test of time and consistently prove to be habits of winners. As a country, we are looking at some very tough economic times. Our leaders are calling us to get back to basics. That is because basics work. Habits are developed at a very early age, and some habits are very good for us and prove beneficial in our life and some habits are negative, extremely negative. A habit as simple as a family dinner can have major lifelong effects. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has consistently found that children who have frequent family dinners are less likely to use marijuana, tobacco and drink alcohol. Personally, and professionally, I have found that to be true as well. At a time when our nation is in need of some serious back to basics in every aspect of our culture, nothing could resonate more clearly to the family unit that the need, that's right, the need for children to have dinner with their family. [more...]

A Nation of Overly Medicated Consumers By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Consumer Reports has some new information in their October issue advising people who suffer from frequent headaches to talk to their doctors before reaching into their medicine cabinets. Overuse of prescription and over-the-counter pain medications can in fact make headaches worse. They go on to say that consumers inadvertently create their own headaches. CR tells us that people tend not to think of headaches remedies, especially those they can buy without a prescription, as "serious" drugs. It even says that the headache can even be made worse and result in "medication overuse headaches," which affect up to two thirds of patients who seek help in headache treatment centers. Why is it that we are willing to spend unlimited amounts of money and lives on drugs but prevention is a foreign thought process? We truly are a nation of consumers, but at what cost? [more...]

Is Anyone in Washington Listening? By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

According to a study published in the journal Obesity, by the year 2030, 86 percent of American adults will be overweight. By 2048 the study suggests that all U.S. adults will be at least mildly overweight. Frightening? I do hope so! This affects each and every citizen both directly as well as indirectly. It is time to take this epidemic seriously and make some timely changes before it's too late. It seems during our present presidential campaign season the word "change" is often heard, yet in the reality of our nation, we pay for very few health care services that have to do with prevention and wellness, no less education. Such a link to lack of preventative services is going to skyrocket our healthcare costs; and many of the lifestyle diseases - cardiovascular disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and certain cancers - have already been linked to obesity or weight related problems, yet we simply prescribe a pill and hope for the best. Wouldn't it make more sense to allocate educational funds for media campaigns to explain the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle and maintaining a healthy weight, and how that can help each and every American? [more...]

The Medicare Debacle By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

On July 1 the government slashed Medicare physician payments by 10.6 percent. Has the cost of overhead gone down? The answer is no. So how can this be? What will this do to an already burdened, dysfunctional system? Let's start with the fact that the Medicare system is not doing business with other parts of healthcare in the same manner. Only the physicians - those who actually treat the patients - are being unjustly harmed. Medicare, in fact, gives payment increases to the insurance industry, nursing homes and hospitals. The reality of this disastrous decision is that approximately 60 percent of Medicare doctors would be forced to limit the number of new Medicare patients they would accept and treat. More than half of the doctors said they would need to cut staff as a result, and 14 percent say they would quit practice all together due to the inability to profit. A bill that would buy time for a realistic long-term solution to the problem between Washington and the medical community has been passed by Congress. Now it's time for the Senate to act swiftly to consider the same legislation. [more...]

ER Docs as Primary Care Physicians By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Picture this scene with me if you will for one minute because it just might affect you. You are rushed to the hospital due to chest pain, an obvious emergency situation where you are literally facing life or death due to a heart attack. You get to the ER and cannot be treated in time due to the lack of beds available because a bed was actually taken by a "fake patient" - a patient who is there to see how the doctor and staff do their job. Sounds like an overcrowded urban facility, and sounds like it is an impossible scenario. Well at this point, it is all fictional but may soon become a reality for us all, not just due to the situation of patients using the ER doctor as a primary care physician, but there is actually an ethics committee for the American Medical Association that is pressing for "undercover patients" to evaluate doctors and their staff. Such a situation could have disastrous consequences as doctors and hospitals are currently overburdened to begin with. We are faced with a system that wants to spy on the physicians and judge their performance at a time when physicians are working harder with more hoops to jump through due to a healthcare system that has more middlemen than actual doctors. Just try to have a procedure approved and you will see exactly what I am writing about. [more..]

The Virtues of Age and its Wisdom By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Now that we are left with our two candidates for this seemingly unprecedented presidential election, we have already heard the Obama camp trying to use age as a derogatory characteristic about McCain. While that really shouldn't surprise me that in 2008 we look at 71 as old, it does. It is no secret that as a society we do not respect the aged. If we look at what I would suggest to be the model society when it comes to age, wellness, and wisdom, all eyes would be on the Japanese Island of Okinawa where the elder citizens of the community are sought after because of the wisdom they can impart on the rest of their society. They are the cornerstones of the community. They also have more centenarians than any other culture in the world. Let's take a hard look at our country, the good ol' USA, which is so caught up in materialistic beauty that we may just cast a ballot based on how attractive someone looks, based on their age, and "hip-ness." Scary as that is, many voters put no more effort into their decision than just that.

The latest research coming out of Harvard, Duke, UCLA and many other gold standard institutions of data tells us that wisdom, while being a difficult word to define, has been biologically uncovered. The research has shown that the prefrontal cortex of the brain has decreased activity in the older brain. This decreased activity allows for a broader attention span and the brain has the ability to assimilate data and put it in its proper place. The elder brain takes longer to absorb the information, but the trade-off is that it is better at understanding the data with all the qualities which define wisdom such as knowledge, understanding, experience, discretion and the capacity to use all. The largest age discrepancy in all of history for U.S. presidential candidates exists today. Think about what the 25-year difference means to the qualities that define the virtue of wisdom. The questions become: is Obama mature and ready and is McCain sharp and vigorous? It is in America that we get to decide!

The Wisdom of the Ages By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

While you might be concerned that you may have the beginnings of the dreaded Alzheimer's Disease when you couldn't remember a name or address, for example, a new work published by Harvard research psychologist Shelley Carson tells us that for most of the adults 65 years of age and older, the thought that our brain power is declining is not always the case. While 13 percent of Americans 65 and older have Alzheimer's Disease, the healthy 87 percent of the brains are actually taking more time to sift through the mounting data and then combine that with the vast storage of knowledge. The research has shown that the prefrontal cortex of the brain has decreased activity. This also allows for a broader attention span and the brain has the ability to assimilate data and put it in its proper place. That certainly is a great deal of work... no wonder it takes a moment! The elder brain takes longer to absorb the information but then is better adept at understanding the data with all the qualities I spoke of such as experience, discretion, and then the capacity to utilize the newfound information with understanding. That I believe is a key link, combining the data and understanding it collectively. Research has also shown that people with an injury or disease to the prefrontal cortex of the brain had the ability to pursue new creative interests. Very interesting as that may be why we can see our parents or our aging friends and neighbors become new people with new hobbies and interests that we never knew they had an interest in before. So while the elusive term wisdom has been so sought after and revered by all of mankind from the beginning of time we may finally have put together the pieces of how and why it all works. Now that really is wisdom! [more on Dr. Higgins...]