May 15, 2014

Saturated Fat

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

Back in March there was a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine about saturated fat in your diet. Scientists looked at 72 previous studies of more than 600,000 people in 18 countries.

This review looked at the amount of saturated fat people consumed in their diets and found it really doesn’t have any effect on your risk for heart disease.

If saturated fats really don’t harm your heart as mainstream medicine has pushed for all these years, the question then becomes: Why did they push this idea for so many years?

May 01, 2014

Back Pain Overdiagnosed

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

A few weeks ago an article by Daniel DeNoon of the Harvard Health Blog ran in our local paper. It was titled, “Back pain overdiagnosed, overtreated.” He quotes Dr. Bruce E Landon, a professor at Harvard Medical School, saying, “Most routine back pain will improve on its own WITH conservative therapy in three months, often shorter than that. Even more importantly, when we do more aggressive things – such as injections, [high tech] imaging, and surgery- the long term outcomes don’t change at all. These things have very little impact on what is going on, and they have the potential to make things worse.”

Wow! What a complete indictment of how most people are treated when they present to their medical doctors for back pain. There is so much new evidence coming in every year that shows conservative care for back pain is the first treatment of choice for the best results.