Last week a friend of mine who is a family doctor told me about a patient of his who came in regularly for years for visits, weighing about 320 pounds, which was over 100 pounds over his recommended weight.

This patient was suffering from Diabetes, Coronary Heart Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis...

While ideology and profit politics predominate discussions and inhibit momentum toward any meaningful and sweepingly effective health care reform in America, there are fundamental and effective options on the table for changing the health culture and health of Americans. Toward the top of that list is the subject of this...

Now that the beer moment is over, let's go back just one more time to the controversy over Obama's use of the word stupid (or a related form of that word) to describe what happened in Cambridge on the night Professor Gates came home from his trip and ended up...

Humans marvel when they study social animals. We are all taught as children that bees and ants and other animals have complex and predictable organized behavior that makes their groups behave almost as one functioning organism -- predictable, orderly and essentially healthy. We marvel when animals display grooming, caring and...

Sometime last year, I listened to an optimistic report over the radio, reporting that Pittsburgh didn't really need to worry about the demise of the steel industry because the health care industry there was doing so well and prospering in the form of major medical centers and facilities.

During the recent pre-inaugural concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Tom Hanks read the last words of Lincoln's Gettysburg address in a way I hadn't heard them before. Usually when I think of those words I stress the first word of every phrase... "Government...of the people, by the...

Who wants to be reminded of the great financial disaster of 2008 and all the years of crazy unregulated financial dealing that lead up to it every time they go to a baseball game? I would think the answer would be no-one.

Last week, I flew into LaGuardia Airport...

In response to my last post, I got a great email from my uncle reporting that he had been making phone calls for Obama all week end and working to help assure that Pennsylvania goes for Obama.

He reported to me some wisdom from my grandfather, a life-long union man,...

Making America Work For the Middle Class is Redistribution of Wealth and the American Dream

Boy, have Americans been duped. Right now, redistribution of wealth in American means that taxpayer money is funneled into a "bail out" and then, in part, shuffled off to give rich people even...

In "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat" there's a song which ends with the line "any dream will do." But if the current campaign has proved anything, it's proved that that is not true. It is increasingly hard for me to believe that anyone who supported Hillary Clinton during...

Change I Can Be Livin' In; The Republicans Can Become Nice...or even Just Honest or Civil.

When I notice myself starting to feel helpless and afraid in the face of mob meanness and nastiness, I, in the good old American tradition, speak out before my fear deepens my sense of...

Everybody says the election campaign is heating up. In America that has come to mean that the Republicans will start even more spinning and lying and fear mongering and dividing and pandering to everyone's basest fears and insecurities for political gain. We've been living with that for eight years and...

Many years ago when Naropa Institute was just getting going as a Buddhist center of higher learning out in Boulder Colorado, I went to hear Gregory Bateson, to my mind of of the great thinkers of the 20th Century, talk there. Amidst his eloquent goings on, he cautioned us young...

So, I supported Obama through the difficult and sometimes very nasty primary season, offered publicly to be his private cook and acupuncturist during the upcoming campaign, and now want to look at the changes which, as a healthy care practitioner, I would give top priority in planning the HEALTHY LIVE...

I have colleagues and acquaintances who have been personal chefs to various celebrities, preparing daily beautiful meals of the finest quality whole foods, mostly plants, always delicious. Inspired by their work and by my own work offering delicious healthy foods to my acupuncture patients over the years, I've decided to...

Let's proclaim this National Stress Reduction Week.

Try as we may to avoid it, in our techno-driven culture we are still essentially and completely biological beings, linked inextricably with natural cycles of moon, sun, heat, cold, and time. Our bodies and minds, not that they are separate, are on...

I rarely lose sleep over politics, but last night, after the Texas and Ohio primary results were in, I found myself tossing and turning over Hillary's "W" factor. That's Dubayou...not for woman, but for the mentor in mean spirited politics...and his genius band of Wiley and Vicious Negators, she's had...

Dedicated to Barbara Seaman/Women's Health Pioneer and Author of The Doctors Case Against the Pill

In the early 1970s I was lucky to teach teenagers not much younger than myself at the Walden School on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Many of the parents were interesting people...

I just finished one of my favorite gigs of the year, teaching relaxation and meditation to 15 year olds at a nearby school with a wonderfully diverse and interesting student body. We made our way into the subject of disciplining and resting the mind and body by acknowledging together our...

As the new energy bill passed through Congress and we saw, within hours, a denial of states' legal rights to add complexity and even confusion to the national mix by setting their own fuel emission standards, the unwillingness of our market driven economy and life style to really come to...