category : Dr. Mixon's Longevity Journal

Thanks to modern medical advances, there are an almost unlimited number of tests doctors can administer to determine who is at the greatest risk of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Take the simple cholesterol test, for example: today we doctors can subdivide your cholesterol into seven or eight or even nine smaller subtypes and analyze your risk of cardiovascular disease, even if you appear to have “low” or “normal” cholesterol. Physicians today can administer a battery of expensive tests for just about everything.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. In spite of what people often say, estrogen is not a hormone – estrogen is a class of hormones. When a female patient comes to Longevity Medical Clinic and we start discussing Hormone Replacement Therapy, it’s critically important that we use the right type of hormones to accomplish our goal. Women can benefit dramatically from Hormone Replacement Therapy. But they need to receive human type hormone, in doses that maximize benefits while minimizing risks, and the hormones should never be given by mouth.

Most people have heard that obesity can be one of the chief causes of diabetes. But it’s equally true that diabetes can actually make you fat. So does the weight problem cause the disease, or is it the other way around? This is not really a purely academic “chicken or egg” question. To understand what’s going on we need to take a brief look at the physiology involved in becoming diabetic. When we do we discover a metabolic conundrum: body fat can increase the amount of insulin you require, while at the same time those higher levels of insulin can make you fatter.

Would someone define “antiaging,” please?

One of the difficulties inherent in running Longevity Medical Clinic is that I never know exactly how to describe my practice. I don't particularly like the term “antiaging” because I'm not exactly sure what it means. Obviously we all connect emotionally with the idea of looking, feeling and functioning as though we were younger than we are – it’s a compelling thought, one that has been around for centuries. But the obvious reality is that we can’t truly reverse our age: that, as any sci-fi fan knows, involves warping space and time, and somehow shifting us to an earlier point in the space-time continuum. While the quantum physics folks tell us that subatomic particles do this on a regular basis, I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to do it with an intact human being.

A patient recently wrote to ask me for a blog entry about a relatively common but often misunderstood condition called tinnitus.  While tinnitus is not something we normally treat at Longevity Medical Clinic, I want to be responsive to any listener request – so let me shed some light on this topic. I warn you that the news is not particularly encouraging.

Tinnitus is a persistent phantom sound. It can range from a high-pitched whine to a low-pitched rumble, and it most likely occurs as a result of acoustic nerve irritability. Tinnitus can be extremely annoying to the sufferer and it also tends to be difficult to treat. How common is tinnitus? Estimates vary widely, with some studies claiming that more than one in four Americans experiences tinnitus at some point in his or her life. Chronic tinnitus is estimated to afflict anywhere from fewer than 10% of Americans to nearly 20%.