News and ideas worth your attention.

11 Life-Changing Effects of Berberine

Berberine has, for thousands of years, been used to treat an enormous range of conditions, including eye, mouth and ear infections; skin irritations; wound healing; fever; microbial pathogens; digestive and respiratory diseases to name a few. Today, berberine gets high marks for its natural pharmacological properties, including its health-supportive effects on the immune system, metabolism, heart and gut health, blood and kidneys as well as for its antioxidant, antibacterial, anti-fungal and anti-inflammatory powers.

22 Quick and Easy Instant Health Upgrades

Finding it tough to make much needed health and lifestyle changes you know you really need to make? How to change a path of previous fails into a road paved with wellness and vitality? Keep it simple, start small, master one or two habits at a time, and move on to tackle the next upgrade on your list. Also, try starting with the easy stuff first! Keep at it and in time, you’ll evolve into a creature of far more good habits than bad, culminating in major wins for your long-term health and wellness, with positive ripple effects across multiple aspects of your life.

9 Ways to Build New, Healthier Habits – and Make them Stick

Just about all of us have habits we know we need to upgrade and do better with. But as we all know, converting healthy thoughts into healthy habits, especially ingrained ones, is easier said than done. But as the saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If you ‘fall off the wagon,’ resist the siren call to just give up altogether. Instead, think of the slip-up as a temporary lapse, not a permanent condition. The quicker you get yourself back on the healthy habits path, the sooner you’ll change your health – and life – for the better.

14 Ways to Preserve Mental Health – Pandemic or Not

Hard to say how or when the pandemic will eventually end but one thing is for sure, it’s impact on mental health won’t soon be forgotten. One bright spot in the pandemic wilderness has been the de-stigmatization of mental health challenges. Whether you struggle from time to time with pandemic-induced low moods or are dealing with more chronic mental health issues, more than ever, prioritizing, cultivating, and protecting mental health is no longer a taboo subject. That’s fortunate because we’ve still got continued social isolation to contend with, not to mention the classic winter blues that many folks wrestled with even before COVID turned life upside down (think, short days, and cold temps).

How BDNF Keeps Your Brain Healthy and How To Boost Yours

Forgetting your car keys or not remembering where you parked the car. Blanking on a name when making introductions. We all experience these forgetful moments. They unnerve us and maybe they even strike fear in our hearts as we wonder if something sinister could be responsible. For most people, these blips are just that. For others, the news may be less reassuring. But the positive message for all of us is that there are things we can do right now to help lower the risk of neurological problems down the road. One of the most important may be to increase our brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).

Our Top 11 Most Helpful Tips of 2021

If you don’t know where to start, we have gathered our 11 top helpful (and health-full) tips of 2021 to optimize well-being into the next year! You can find these tips and so much more on our Instagram account - @franklipmanmd - please follow along!

Our Top 11 Most Helpful Blogs of 2021

Now is a wonderful time to reflect and make plans for the New Year. And if 2021 did nothing else good, it did point out the importance of prioritizing our health for the greater good. With new variants revealing themselves, finding ways to incorporate new (or old) healthful habits into the day-to-day is essential.

7 Simple Ways to Shed Pandemic Weight Gain — and Prevent Extra Holiday Pounds!

The holidays will soon be over but by all indications the pandemic won’t be. What that means is that you can’t wait for the all-clear from the CDC to begin getting your life in order. And one of the most obvious, and yes, visible, reminders that COVID has done a number on our well-being is more than a few extra pounds, the end-result of a more stressed-out sedentary lifestyle, heavy on the high-carb comfort foods. If you’ve been back-sliding over the last 18+ months, now’s the time to take (or re-take) control of your diet and your weight and start turning the vicious circle of the pandemic (more pounds, more blues, less physical activity) into the “virtuous circle” of enhanced health and wellness.

10 Natural Ways to Tame Autumnal Allergies

To breathe easier and more naturally this fall – minus the fall-out from airborne ragweed and mold spores – opt for a healthier, holistic approach that combines simple nutritional and lifestyle upgrades. To get your program started before the leaves start to fall, try a few of my autumnal allergy-fighting tips to help you embrace the season with a clearer head – and a lot less sneezing.

How to Know if You Have Hashimoto’s Disease

Allowing Hashimoto’s to run unchecked creates more inflammation in the body. This exacerbates symptoms. It also increases your chances of developing a second or third autoimmune condition.

6 Ways to Drink the Cleanest Water Possible

When it comes to water quality, few of us truly know much beyond what the bottlers and/or local government officials may claim, and we all know how that worked out in Flint, Michigan. So, the most sensible and health-protective approach is to take precautions, minimize your toxin exposure and focus on getting the purest water you can. How to reduce the amount of health-undermining effluvia that lurks in the average cup of tap? Here are a few ideas on how to clean up your water act.

Feel Good Now! 6 Tips for a Happy, Healthy Thyroid

Every day, your thyroid is speaking to you, but if you don’t speak the language, you’ll be hard-pressed to understand what’s going on with it, much less how to keep it healthy. Why does your thyroid matter? Well, for starters, it controls the way your body uses energy, helping to regulate your metabolism and governing your responsiveness to other hormones. It’s the great balancer, working 24/7 to help keep you on a hormonal even keel. So, when it’s not functioning optimally, neither will you. You’ll feel sluggish, even exhausted and you may start piling on the pounds while your doc says your thyroid levels are ‘normal.’ Trouble is, thyroid levels that appear ‘normal’ on paper, in real life may be way too low (or too high) for your particular anatomy.

9 Ways to Bring More Happiness Into Your Life

Though you may never have thought of happiness as something you could work on, take my word for it -- never has finding ways to cultivate happiness been more important. That’s not to say you should focus on happiness to the exclusion of all else, get stuck in the unrealistic, feelings-minimizing ‘stay positive’ mantra when things are going to hell, or toss your meds into the sea. What it does mean is that you can do a lot to buoy mental and physical health simply by applying a few happiness-boosting techniques to your repertoire. Even if you weren’t born with an innate sense of happiness, it’s a learnable skill to start practicing today.

9 Ways to Stay Well on Your Summer Travels, Flying Adventures and Road Trips

How to avoid travel ills no matter where you roam? Think immunity, as in keeping your body – and your gut – fortified so it’s less susceptible to bugs – and better equipped to fight them off should one try to slow you down. A compromised or unbalanced gut sets you up for vacation-disrupting ills like indigestion, bloating, diarrhea, constipation – none of which you want to be dealing with while you’re trying to unwind and enjoy yourself.

8 Timely Tips to Stay Healthy in Summer’s Heat

Go easy on yourself when summer temperatures climb and the heat rolls in. Wear light-colored clothes, hats and sunglasses and drink plenty of liquids. What else can we do to avoid temperature-related ills? Check out my timely tips to help get you through the heat to come.

9 Essential Ways to Emerge from the COVID Cave – and into Post Pandemic Life

Fast and Effective Fixes for the 3 Most Common Tech Injuries

For the last 16 or so months, all those hundreds of daily, small postural compromises we’ve unconsciously made while being tethered to computers and devices, have taken a toll. These folded over, rolled and forward-jutting body shapes we’ve assumed —sometimes for hours at a time—got repeated over and over, until they started pulling millions of spines out of alignment. The result? Structural issues like back pain and hip imbalances which have triggered problems body-wide – and hardly the recipe for a productive day at the (home) office.

10 Frequently Asked Questions on CBD Use

Not long ago, it seemed like few people in the States had ever heard of cannabidiol, or CBD, much less knew what to do with it. And those who were vaguely familiar often confused it with the stuff that gets you high. Fast forward five or so years and today, CBD is everywhere, tucked inside everything from oils, tinctures and pills to candies, smoothies, bath bombs and beauty creams. Safe to say, CBD is a ‘thing.’

7 Ways Laughter Makes Staying Healthy Easier

Excerpt: Just like eating your veggies and getting good rest and daily exercise, adding frequent doses of laughter to the mix is an easy and pleasurable way to support the health of your heart and brain, while also lightening some of life’s darker moments. Plus, it’s safer than any Big Pharma pill-of-the-moment. Over the years, I’ve seen laughter in action in my practice on an almost daily basis -- patients with a good sense of humor tend to heal better and faster than those who don’t.

11 Tips on How to Enjoy Sunshine Responsibly

Beyond just simply being drawn to the sun – its light, its warmth, the everything-will-be-OK vibe it brings – we actually need sunshine. Much like plants which harness the sun's rays through photosynthesis, our bodies use sunlight to help the skin produce the vitamin D it needs to build bones, tame inflammation, boost the immune system and protect against cancer.

6 Common Drugs Your Body Needs to Try Cut Ties With

Contrary to what you might think, I’m not against medications, but I am against their overuse – and we are a nation of over-users. Lots of people think pills are harmless: they may do some good, and well, the doc said to take an Advil and call him in the morning, so why not? I’ll tell you why not. Drugs, be they prescription or over-the-counter, unbalance the system by design.

18 Ways Kindness Can Save Your Life and Change It For the Better

While kindness may have seemed in short supply during the upheaval of the past few years, now is the perfect time to reconnect with the idea of sharing kindness that only you can give. Not only will it make others feel better, it will also support your own physical and mental well-being. In other words, everybody wins!

5 Benefits of Making Music Your Medicine

Music has the power to heal, to encourage feelings of well-being and to soothe a stressed-out mind – making it the perfect elixir for our current moment. It’s also one of the healthiest ways I know to self-medicate and I encourage everyone to dose up frequently.

11 Healthful Tips to Get 2021 Started in the Right Direction

Get this New Year started out right with Dr. Lipman's top health tips to get started right now.