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 …

There has been a lot of research over the years on the best way to warm up. Athletes want to know the right way to do it so that they can do their best performance when it counts. But it’s equally important to be able to reduce the risk of injury so you can run hard without hurting yourself. Is there a way to warm up that achieves both goals – optimal performance and minimal risk of injury? Should you do static stretching or dynamic stretching? Should you jog and …

In my work with athletes, ranging from park runners up to World and Olympic champions, one of the key differences I’ve seen that separates the elite is that they know when to push themselves, and they know when to back off. They know that missing half a session because you’re concerned about an injury is better than pushing on, getting hurt, and then missing an entire week, if not more. The number one priority, no matter what event you are training for, is to get to the starting line in …

As you saw in my previous article , breathing can help improve the tone of the Vagus Nerve. This has been linked to reduced stress and anxiety levels, reduced heart rate, reduced blood pressure, and even reduced risk of dying from cancer.
A 2016 article talked more about the link between stress and cancer, saying that stress acts as a ‘fertiliser’ by increasing the number of lymphatic vessels draining from the tumour, but increase flow in existing vessels. “So not only do you get new freeways out of the tumour but …

My number 1 health tip for 2015 was to MOVE MORE, and no doubt you would’ve seen one of the countless articles talking about how bad prolonged sitting is for your health. Some articles called prolonged sitting worse for your health than smoking or obesity, and 60 Minutes did a great story which I posted outlining the benefits of moving more.
If 2015 was all about MOVING, 2016 is all about BREATHING. Well, breathing and Bruno Mars. I love that guy.
When we talk about breathing, in very basic terms we are …

Here is a great article I just read which outlines in basic terms the key differences between back pain that is straightforward and musculo-skeletal in nature, and back pain that is coming from a more serious underlying condition. A lot of times when the pain is severe it can be extremely concerning, and this article helps explain a lot of what is going on.
Some key points:
People understandably assume that the worst back pain is the scariest. In fact, pain intensity is a poor indicator of back pain ominousness.
Herniated discs aren’t …