Blog Archive
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered dramatic changes throughout everyday life — and in the medical community as well. Not only are providers across the country postponing elective procedures, but many are also encouraging people to avoid in-office appointments to reduce their risk of exposure to this highly contagious coronavirus.But what...
Polymerase Chain Reaction Testing Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing refers to a chemical process where billions of copies of a specific DNA or RNA are replicated allowing its amplification and study. PCR has been optimized to enable the diagnosis and study of various disease-causing agents including viruses, and bacteria. The...
Our Microbiome We must devote much more time to analyze the microbiome in comprehensive detail in order to help create a healthy human and society. As Paul Nurse writes, “When scientists look at our own bodies, they see that for each and every one of our 30 trillion or more...
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence What can we expect from Big Data and artificial intelligence? We now have data generated from vast numbers of longitudinal, observational multicenter clinical trials and registries across the world to teach us about disease features, treatment selection, and practice patterns. The information from real-world management...
Within dermatology we have the exciting potential for new avenues of growth to add on to our valuable pattern recognition, diagnostic, and treatment skills. Personalized Medicine (PM) is the customization of healthcare using molecular analysis to influence medical decisions, practices, and therapies for the individual patient. The idea of personalized...
How Can We Deliver Life Enhancing Therapy to the Brain Via the Skin? What are topical nootropics (brain enhancing drugs)? How does transdermal drug delivery work? What are common drugs delivered via the skin? How will this change in the future? The skin is the largest organ in the body,...
How does aging skin contain clues about aging brains? Aging runs parallel to accumulation of stress. Aging is defined as a time sequential deterioration of living things that is prompted by increased susceptibility to disease and adverse events, leading to loss of viability and physiologic functions. In simpler terms, aging...
What are the connections between touch, sight, hearing, and mental illness? The research is provocative but still inconclusive. How does touch, vision, and the brain interact with mental illness? Are there levels of brain-tactile dysfunctions in a continuum just as there is with autism and schizophrenia? No congenitally blind person...
What Does the Skin Reveal about Psychiatric Disorders? In what ways does the skin reveal brain changes? Perhaps the most important skin signs are seen with neuropsychiatric, addiction, pain and itch disorders. Psychiatric disorders are central nervous system conditions with a neurobiological basis. They generally involve disturbances of emotion, cognition,...
Do Women and Men Feel and Remember Touch Differently? Over the years I have heard countless stories about touch and skin, told from myriad points of view, and wonder about the gender derivation of the narratives. Does sexual orientation and hormone affect the brain-skin connection? Men and women are genetically...
How can the skin provide a way to detect brain abnormalities? Much of my interest and research over the last decade has been on the connection between the skin and the brain, including searching for skin biomarkers to detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the connection between Parkinson’s disease (PD) and...
How did the evolution of hairlessness help us to stay alive and create bigger brains? Theories abound as to why we became relatively hairless as compared to other species. One theory about our abandonment of fur includes the avoidance of parasites. As we became less nomadic and inhabited caves and...
We all understand the joys of our always-wired world—the connections, the validations, the laughs … the info. … But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs. Andrew Sullivan (2016) Phantom Vibration Syndrome and Hypervigilance It’s a singularly modern problem, but also one rooted deep in human...
Touch - The Primary Brain-Skin Connection How does the skin communicate with the brain through the sense of touch? Touch involves sensory receptors that decode physical or chemical stimuli into electrical impulses that travel from the outer brain to the inner brain, along the central nervous system, at over 200...
How does the human skin microbiome influence our brain and mental status? Our skin reflects critical changes to the way we think, feel, and perceive. Both skin cells and brain cells develop from the same kind of embryonic tissue (ectoderm). The skin is the largest organ of the human body...
Over the last several years I have been working on a new book titled The Outer Brain: The Power of the Brain-Skin Connection. I have always been fascinated by this powerful connection and started from the beginning—the embryo—to explore what makes this all happen. Join me as I provide a...
Optimum Skin Health is my skin care program. Integrative therapies will be included and have been used since the dawn of the first healers and their patients, with the very earliest use of plants for healing the skin. Over the last 50 years, integrative dermatology therapies have become increasingly popular...