I find it interesting that people seem to love to hate on Big Pharma, but attitudes towards the natural products industry seem to be much more positive. I’m not trying to suggest that Big Pharma is wonderful, because they’re not; I just don’t think the dichotomy of Pharma being bad and the natural products industry …
The Natural Products Industry: A Major Money Machine Read More »
Decolonizing Wellness by dietitian Dalia Kinsey aims to help QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folks reject diet culture and restrictive ideas about bodies and food in order to achieve greater self-love and self-acceptance. The author, who identifies as a genderqueer, pansexual person of colour, wrote this book to fill a gap in …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms… but not this week. Instead, we’ll take a look at ME/CFS, and why it’s absolutely not all in someone’s head. The National Institutes of Health describes ME/CFS as “a debilitating disease that lacks a universally accepted case definition, cause, diagnosis, or …
What Is… ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue) Read More »
We all have trillions of microbes living in our intestines. This microbiome, which develops in infancy, plays a major role in our digestion, but there’s growing evidence that it affects more than just our digestive system. This collection of critters weighs about 2 kg and includes bacteria, fungi, and viruses. There is no “normal” microbiome …
It’s been more than a year, and COVID is still going strong. It’s made a lot of people sick and it’s killed a lot of people. The lockdowns and social distancing have given most people cabin fever, and the ongoing stress has been bad for everyone’s mental health. But what about those of us who …
Has COVID Impacted Your Access to (Mental) Health Care? Read More »
While we’re used to looking through a Western lens at health and wellness, I think there can be a great deal of value in looking at other ways of understanding to gain new ideas. The medicine wheel is used by certain North American Indigenous peoples to tie together culture, traditional knowledge, health, and healing. Traditionally, …
We’ve probably all heard of the placebo effect, but what is it, and how does it work. For something that happens regularly, it’s not all that well understood. A placebo is any substance that’s not intended or expected to have any therapeutic effect. Ethically, it generally wouldn’t be considered acceptable to give a patient a …
The Placebo Effect: What Is It and Why Does It Happen? Read More »
There are plenty of odd pseudoscientific health practices out there, but psychic surgery kicks it up to a whole new level of weird. Psychic surgery isn’t like what happens in an operating room; it’s more like what happens on a magician’s stage. Sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts are used to make the …
Detox diets and cleanses are quite popular these days, especially if you’re of the Goop-y persuasion. And while they might seem to make sense on an intuitive level, from a scientific perspective, is there anything to actually back that up? Or is it just pseudoscientific nonsense? “Toxins” Commercial detox products tend to refer vaguely to …
The term adrenal fatigue was first used by chiropractor James Wilson in 1998, and it became popular with a book he published in 2001. I’ve written before about some of the quacky dabbling of chiropractors outside the neck and back pain issues we commonly associate them with. You can probably guess from that alone where …
