There are some rare diseases that appear at birth known as inborn errors of metabolism. Their symptoms are nonspecific in most cases and each of them is unrecognizable clinically, with some exceptions. All of them are genetically determined. Most of them can be spotted from a tiny sample of blood that is sent to a […]
The Hippocratic Oath, supposedly sworn to by all physicians when they graduate, is well known to contain the sentence “Thou shalt do no harm”. In spite of this, the “Table of iatrogenic deaths in the United States” (deaths induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedure) lists 106,000 cases […]
Hormones Matter received an email from a mother of a 10-year-old girl. The medical history that she wrote is so complex that it is hardly surprising that it has confounded all of the physicians that have been consulted. I decided that it was so typical of many “mysterious” illnesses in America, that I would write […]
Do We Really Understand Stress?Sometimes, we use a relatively meaningless phrase when we say that a given person “is all stressed out”. I came to the conclusion that the word “stress”, as used in medicine, needed to have some discussion and explanation, even though I have addressed the subject previously. I turned to the 1946 […]
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that arises when the body’s response to infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs. Common signs and symptoms include fever, increased heart rate, increased breathing rate, and confusion (note confusion). What few people realize is that brain function is really in control of the situation. Notice that fever, […]
Allergic diseases are a number of conditions caused by hypersensitivity of the immune system to typically harmless substances in the environment. They include hay fever, food allergy, asthma and anaphylaxis. Symptoms may include red eyes, an itchy rash, sneezing, runny nose, shortness of breath, or swelling. In many cases, allergy is little more than a […]
There is ever increasing evidence that energy metabolism is involved in the causation of cancer. A phenomenon known as the Warburg effect has been known for a century and was thought by Warburg to be the cause of cancer. To summarize this effect, normal cells primarily produce energy by the consumption of oxygen in a […]
I have been studying thiamine metabolism since 1969 when I published the first case of thiamine dependency: Intermittent cerebellar ataxia associated with hyperpyruvic acidemia, hyperalaninemia, and hyperalaninuria. The case involved a 6-year old boy experiencing recurrent episodes of cerebellar ataxia (a brain disease resulting in complete loss of a sense of balance). These episodes, occurring intermittently, […]