Dr. Rick's Insights

Hi All, A common clinical aphorism advises patients to "treat pain early." This advice is often dismissed as vague or unsupported, particularly when studies show that basic analgesics such as acetaminophen or NSAIDs do not reliably prevent chronic pain in all conditions. However, this dismissal reflects a category error: it evaluates a systems-level phenomenon using a drug-specific lens. When acute pain involves substantial autonomic, protective, and threat-related patterning, early intervention is not about symptom suppression. It is about interrupting a learning process. In this context, pain is not merely a signal of tissue injury, but a state the nervous system...

Stress is often called the “silent killer.”Not because it appears on death certificates — but because it quietly reshapes the body over time. Chronic stress is strongly linked to: Heart disease Stroke High blood pressure Diabetes Depression Immune dysfunction Everybody in the medical world already knows it but fails to truly address it's root cause!  As such chronic disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Persistent stress is one of its most overlooked drivers. But here’s the part most people miss: Stress management usually fails long-term. And it’s not because you’re weak.It’s because we’re approaching stress...

Hi everyone, There is a strange exhaustion in the modern wellness world that people rarely name out loud. Not the exhaustion of being sick, although that is everywhere. A different kind. The exhaustion of doing everything. People are wearing devices, tracking metrics, stacking supplements, chasing protocols, rotating red light, cold, breathwork, peptides, adaptogens, nootropics. They have routines that look disciplined from the outside. Yet many feel the same underlying instability they started with. Sleep still fractures. Energy still collapses at the wrong time. Focus comes and goes like a weather pattern. The body feels “on edge” even when life is...

Hi all,  Here's what medicine tells you about hot flashes: "Changing hormone levels before, during and after menopause are the most common causes of hot flashes. It's not clear how hormonal changes cause hot flashes. But most research suggests that hot flashes happen when lower estrogen levels cause the body's heat manager, also called the hypothalamus, to respond to slight changes in body temperature." This is at verbatim off the Mayo Clinic. And here's also what medicine tells you about the risk factors for severe hot flashes: Smoking, being obese (high BMI), gender specific surgeries, and race are factors that may...