The answer is probably yes! According to a recent article on the Sydney Morning Herald website, “Millions of Australians are taking too many painkillers”. And some of these medications have quite serious side effects. Here are a few key quotes from the article:

“taking higher doses of something like ibuprofen or aspirin, you’re at a higher risk of gastric bleeds, stomach ulcers and bad indigestion”
“Paracetamol is actually really toxic once you get to certain doses, affecting people’s livers in ways that are not easily reversible, and people can die.”
“Ibuprofen-codeine tablets, such as Nurofen …

A new study has looked at whether getting a steroid injection for osteoarthritis (OA) in the knee is beneficial. This is a reasonably common procedure for OA and is often used to see if surgery can be put off.
In the study, a group of people aged 45 and over were given injections every 3 months for 2 years. There were 2 groups; 1 was given a steroid, the other given a placebo. In the group given steroid injections, the researchers found that not only did it not help with pain, it …

Happy Monday everyone, I just read this super interesting article on the website Science Daily which summarises the findings of a recent study on meditation and yoga. There were some pretty incredible results which I thought I would share. Check out some of the key points of the article below and click here to read the full article.
The most incredible finding was not just that meditation or yoga can help you feel relaxed, they can actually reverse changes to your DNA which are linked to depression and poor health.
Key points:

Stress causes inflammation …

A new study suggests that it might be! According to an article on the New York Times website this week, “People who regularly run or walk briskly appear to have healthier discs in their spines than people who do not exercise”.
The article cites a study performed in Australia where researchers recorded the weekly mileage of runners and compared that to MRI images of their lower backs.
They found that “the runners’ discs were larger and contained more fluid than the discs of the men and women who did not exercise.” These are both …

I recently came across a great article on Medical News Today about how to manage sciatic pain. It has a good list of stretches for the glutes, hips and lower back which I recommend you check out if you have been having and pain in and around your hips or the back of your leg.
Sciatica involves compression of the nerve and so the first sign is usually pain. But if you start to develop symptoms like numbness, tingling, or pins and needles, then the nerve function has been cut off and you …

Knee pain. It’s not fun. But around half of us will suffer from it at some point in our lifetime. 
Question is, could sugar be making a common problem much worse?
What usually causes knee pain?
There are lots of different structures that can cause pain in the knee area; tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bone. Usually, you have to suffer a proper trauma to damage anything; it takes a fair bit of force to break bones or rupture ligaments.
Another way to get knee pain is a gradual build up over time. Reports show around …

Hello and Happy New Year to you all! It sure was a wild 2016 so I hope you got to enjoy some time off over holiday season to recharge the batteries for 2017.
The clinic I have worked in for 12 of the last 14 years has been sold so I have moved. As of MONDAY JANUARY 16TH 2017 I will be working in a clinic at 251 Oxford St BONDI JUNCTION. It’s about 3 minutes walk from my old clinic so shouldn’t be too big a disruption. I am up …

In this first article of a series on how sugar impacts your health, I’m going to start by looking at the role a high sugar diet plays in inflammation. I first developed an interest in this link when patients would mention in passing that they had noticed an improvement in their pain levels after doing a sugar detox. They were doing the sugar detox for other reasons, but found this added benefit occurred as well.
After hearing this a bunch of times, I started looking into it, and it didn’t take …

There are few things I enjoy more than meeting another Dr Google. And I must confess to getting amongst it myself from time to time, checking to see if that bruise on my toe could potentially be a rare form of untreatable cancer. Heck, the sooner I know, the sooner I can book my one way ticket to the bahamas!
The increase in information available on the net is proving to be a wonderful resource for a lot of people, but, and this might come as a shock to some of you, …

The New York Times posted a really interesting article this week (click here if you want to read it), about the effectiveness (or otherwise), of common surgical procedures. We kind of assume that a doctor won’t recommend surgery for us unless we really need it, and unless it’s going to fix us. After all, there are significant risks and costs involved in surgery, so there must be compelling reasons for them to recommend it, right? Turns out that may not be the case.
As they noted, surgery is not regulated in the …