Your Favorite 10 Articles from 2024

Thank you, dear readers, for being here with me!

Dec 31, 2024

Dear subscribers,

There are now 32 thousand of you!! Together, we have built this community—a home for straight talk about medical news, and a forum for honest conversations about mental and physical health. I am incredibly grateful for each one of you. I’m doubly grateful for paid subscribers. Thank you!

time lapse photography of fireworks at night — Photo by Roven Images on Unsplash

The mission of this Are You Okay? newsletter is to help you reclaim agency over your health—and to navigate the broken medical system while avoiding the pitfalls of the wellness industry. This starts by redefining health as more than a set of lab tests or a certain outcome but instead as a process that puts YOU back in the driver’s seat of your health.

So today, I’m featuring your favorite posts from 2024. These are posts that made you think, offered actionable medical advice, or somehow made your life better.

1. Let’s Cut Through The Noise about Ozempic and Obesity

The debate around obesity’s causes—from the fast food industry to the failure of individual willpower—is decades old. What’s new are the highly effective GLP-1 weight loss medications (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound) and heightened ideological divides on the subject.

This post is a plea to quit it with the false dichotomies. Telling someone with obesity not to take Ozempic and “just eat better!” is like telling someone with asthma not to take their inhaler and “just breathe better.” Similarly, inappropriately telling someone that genetics alone are responsible for their weight problem—or, perhaps worse, that body acceptance is tantamount to treating their long term risks of cardiovascular disease—deprives them of agency over their health.

To better understand this lightening rod issue, click here.

2. A Doctor’s Pain in the Neck

This post is about my own medical odyssey with neck pain and a herniated disc in my spine. In this post, I remind you that doctors are certified experts in denial, avoidance, and magical thinking. So, yes: I did what most people do first when their skeleton is on the fritz: I ignored it. But wishful thinking only got me so far.

I spent more time than I’d like to admit reading product reviews and feeling sorry for total strangers with neck problems. I was able to snap out of my internet trance by express-shipping an inflatable neck pillow and a home traction device. But despite smart packaging and promises of a miracle, no guru or gizmo was going to do the trick.

To find out what my neck pain (aka my skeletal “check engine light”) was really telling me, click here.

3. Six Tips for Aging with Intention (With or Without Plastic Surgery)

I think we can agree that aging is no picnic. There’s a lot about it we cannot control. But when patients ask me how to prevent age-related illness and despair, I remind them that they have a lot more agency than they think—with or without a facelift.

In this post I talk about evidence-based ways to age with intention. From optimizing dietary protein to focusing on muscle tone and cognitive health, there are plenty of non-surgical health hacks that withstand the test of time.

To read about my anti-anti-aging “toolkit,” click here.

4. My Favorite Things At the Pharmacy - Arthritis Edition

Arthritis and joint pain is common and can be debilitating. Osteoarthritis happens when the protective cartilage that cushions the ends of bones wears down over time, leading to pain, stiffness, and reduced mobility. It most commonly affects weight-bearing joints like the knees, hips, and spine, and tends to worsen with age.

For advice on non-prescription remedies such as Voltaren gel, glucosamine chondroitin, fish oil, and turmeric, click here.

5. Myths & Facts About Menopause & HRT

Separating myth from fact has never been harder in our current landscape. The combination of poor access to evidence-based medical care plus easy access to social media and wellness industry hacks is enough to give anyone hot flashes. And while I try to remain humble about what I don’t know, I do know this: hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been woefully under-prescribed for over 20 years—ever since the Women’s Health Initiative came out in 2002.

Women are entitled to the truth about the risks and benefits of hormone therapy, especially given that the benefits of HRT outweigh the risks for the vast majority of women if it is initiated within the first ten years of a woman’s menopause.

To read more about these thorny issues affecting 50% of the global population, click here.

6. Do You Have Brain Fog?

In this post, I describe my patient who came to see me for brain fog—a term that people commonly use to describe the combination of fatigue and difficulty with focus, concentration, and/or memory. My patient’s brain fog was only made worse by the tsunami of medical misinformation online—and the sifting through gizmos and gurus.

Here's the problem: Our medical system is failing patients. Regular people are expected to practice DIY medicine via Instagram posts and WebMD. Separating myth from fact has never been harder in our current landscape of social media, the wellness industry, and the “guru-ification” of the medical space.

To learn how we figured out her problem, click here.

7. Why Taylor Swift is Good For Your Health

My take on Taylor Swift has nothing to do with her glitter and glam or even her musical talent; it’s about her uncanny ability to remind people what it means to be human. It’s her naming and normalizing and empathizing and permission-giving to ask for help.

After watching five consecutive hours of Taylor Swift (first, her Miss Americana documentary, then her Eras Tour movie), something happened to me. My teenage self felt cared for. I recognized old wounds that had apparently gone unhealed: the anguish of being excluded from a friend group; the exhaustion of people-pleasing at your own expense; the insidiousness of negative self-talk about body image and worthiness; and the emotional cost of trying to be someone you’re not.

To read more about the health benefits of telling your story, click here.

8. Ozempic is a Sophisticated Mind/Body Drug

This post is about the new GLP-1 meds and their uncanny ability to help people (in the appropriate clinical setting) with everything from weight loss and diabetes to alcohol use and compulsive shopping.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there’s something almost magical about Ozempic and its GLP-1 agonist cousins. Sometimes my patients wonder if it’s too good to be true. But as a humble servant of pharmacology, evidence-based medicine, and my patients who struggle with metabolic health, I’m here to tell you that Ozempic is more than meets the eye.

To read about the stunning mind-body effects of these medications, click here.

9. When Crisis Hits Your Family

This post is about grief. When my younger brother Harry died suddenly this past July, I was instantly reminded how grueling loss can be. Of course, there is also no one-size-fits-all template for how to cope with grief, loss, or periods of unimaginable stress. If a playbook existed, it wouldn’t be a crisis. Indeed the cruelest part of any crisis is having to make difficult decisions with incomplete information while you are in a compromised emotional state.

However, there are things I have heard over and over again, year after year, from families and patients navigating hard times that have helped them get through.

To read my thoughts on coping with grief, click here.

10. A Surprising Fix for Weight Gain, Digestive Woes & Skeletal Pain

In 20 years of seeing patients, I regularly see whose symptoms might be ameliorated with a prescription medication. Sometimes the patient even comes in knowing what they want—a diet drug, a sleep aid, a pain pill. And sometimes they are right. However, an equally important element for our nervous system—and indeed our whole health—is: self-compassion.

In this post I write about a patient whose physical symptoms stem from a harsh inner critic and a past history of trauma. It turns out there’s no pill for forgiveness or self-love.

To read about how we addressed her physical and emotional health in tandem, click here.

So, tell me, what subjects resonate most with you? What topics would you like to hear about in 2025? I’m all ears!