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Current and Recently Posted Articles

Letter from the Publisher

In his column for the first Townsend Letter e-newsletter, publisher Jonathan Collin, MD, welcomes readers to the new format and describes his plans for the future. He also comments on two recent articles about the mRNA covid-19 injections and introduces first-time readers to a long-time Townsend contributor....

Sleeping Cold

Sleep hygiene often focuses on light exposure and regular schedule, but ambient temperature is also important. Retired naturopathic doctor Jacob Schor explains the importance of sleeping temperature and how being too hot or too cold (“It’s a Goldilocks thing.”) can disrupt sleep....

The Vitamin B12 Shot

When patients complain of unexplained fatigue or neurological conditions, vitamin B12 therapy is often on the list of possible therapies recommended by integrative and naturopathic doctors.  In this article, Dr. Lobay details the vitamin’s role in health and looks at the use of oral supplements and intramuscular injections....

Ozone Therapy for Covid: A Brief Research Review

Although not recognized by conventional medicine, ozone therapy has been used to treat infectious diseases. As Dr. Steriti explains, several small studies have shown that ozone therapy can reduce mortality risk and speed up clinical improvement in people with covid-19 pneumonia....

Defending Against Post-Infection Cardiovascular Disease

by Michael PasswaterOrthomolecular Medicine News Service One of the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic is that viral infections increase the risk of life-threatening cardiovascular disease. A prospective study in the United Kingdom involving 17,871 patients with Covid-19 and 35,742 controls showed an increased risk of cardiovascular disease following illness […]...

Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Hypothyroidism Need to Improve

Too many patients suffer with symptoms of hypothyroidism because mainstream medicine continues to adhere to levothyroxine (T4) treatment, despite published evidence that many do better with a combination T3 and T4 treatment....

Clinical Uses of CBD for Minor Medical Conditions

A doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine has incorporated the use of a CBD salve to effectively treat patients with migraine headaches, low back pain, menstrual cramps, and anxiety....

The Problem with PFAS – Polyfluoroalkyl’s Health Effects

PFAS “forever” chemicals have been linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, infertility, thyroid disorders, weakened immunity, and more. TL’s environmental health expert explains how to reduce exposure to these chemicals....

Quantum Functional Energy Medicine: Basic Concepts

Incorporating the concepts of vibration and resonance by using modalities such as photobiomodulation, sound, and acupuncture, can provide energy that the body can use to increase health....

Townsend Letter: Moving On

Townsend Letter’s editor pays tribute to the 40-year history of “the examiner of alternative medicine.”...


Best Reads

Osteoporosis in Women: A Look at Risk Factors, Risk Assessment, Bone Density Testing, and Overview of Treatments

By Tori Hudson, ND Osteoporosis is one of the chronic health conditions for which many women seek my input and recommendations.  This is a challenging area for practitioners who have...

Integrative Management of Respiratory Illnesses

by Jeremy Mikolai, ND, and Martin Milner, ND Introduction Infections of the respiratory system commonly present to the outpatient primary care setting. The first decision for the primary care provider...

Beyond Antibiotics: Newer Alternative Approaches to Chronic Lyme Disease Treatment

by Connie Strasheim New treatments for chronic Lyme disease are continually emerging, as researchers and health care practitioners learn more about the infections, co-morbidities, and other problems commonly involved in...

Current Controversies: Innumeracy in Medicine

By Ira L. Goodman, MD, FACS, ABIHM, FAARM We all have an idea of what illiteracy is.  In its extreme, it's the inability to read, either because of a neurological...

Multifactorial Approaches to Lyme Infection

by Dan Kenner, PhD, LAc The term Lyme-literate is used to describe physicians and health-care providers who regard Lyme disease as a complex multifactorial and hydra-headed clinical syndrome. There are numerous challenges...

Kidney Skin Detox

By Dr. Jenna C Henderson Patients with chronic kidney disease are looking for a way to boost kidney function, and those with late-stage kidney disease hope to stave off the need...

Ritalin-Free Kids: Homeopathy for ADHD

Healing with Homeopathy by Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman, ND, DHANP, LCSW,and Robert Ullman, ND More than Ever an Epidemic of ADHD So went the catchy phrase that we used in 1996, when...

Psychoemotional Trauma: The Elephant in the Waiting Room

by Sandro D'Amico, ND A dichotomy in the conception of mind and body has long existed in Western thought and continues to permeate the organization and practice of medicine. For...

What to Do When Patients Wish to Discontinue Their Psychotropic Medications? Effective Tapering Strategies to Limit Drug Withdrawal and Destabilization: a Clinician’s Perspective

by Jonathan E. Prousky, ND, MSc THIRD PLACE WINNER!Best of Naturopathic Medicine 2013 Abstract: The author's private clinical practice focuses on the evaluation and treatment of mental disorders. One of...

Helicobacter Pylori: Foe; Sometimes Friend

by Stephen Olmstead, MD; Kathleen Burns, MSN, RN, NP; Dennis Meiss, PhD; and Janet Ralston, BS The Gastric Microbiota and Helicobacter Pylori Until 1983, conventional medical wisdom decreed that low...

Fatigue, Immunity and Inflammation: Their Resolution Using Natural Medicine

by Michael Ash, BSc, DO, ND, DipION; Robert Settenari, MS; and Prof. Garth L. Nicolson, PhD Overview At some point we all experience fatigue, but it usually resolves on its...

Healing with Stem Cells: My Journey

by David A. Steenblock, MS, DO There is a natural and rather ego-gratifying tendency among most of us doctors to believe that "real" medicine began with our practice of it....

The Biology of Hope

by Leigh Erin Connealy, MD Introduction We are at a point in time where medicine is coming back to whole body health care from a reductionist view that has dominated...

A Mystery Answer to Restoring Brain Health

by David I. Minkoff, MD, Julie Mayer Hunt, DC, DICCP, FCCJP,  and Ron Tribell For the past 20 years I have worked with patients who have had a chronic illness. From...

Metabolic Therapies in Advanced “Salvage” Cancer Cases

by Dr. Paul S. Anderson, NMD An excellent example of true therapeutic synergy was discovered in the earlier days of my IV research (under the NIH-funded Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research...

Favorably Altering the GI Microbiome with Exercise

by David M. Brady, ND, DC, CCN, DACBN, IFMCP SUBSCRIBE TODAY! As preventative health continues to be a primary focus, we continue to seek out ways to improve health through...

Enhancing the Skin Microbiome to Address Inflammatory Dermatologic Conditions

by Trevor Cates, ND Imbalances in the skin microbiome play a key role in skin disorders; and while most microbiome research to date has been focused on the gastrointestinal tract,...

The Trials and Tribulations of Assuring Ascorbic Acid Injection Availability – The Struggle Is Over!

By Ronald M. McGuff President, McGuff Pharmaceuticals, Inc. For those of us on the supply side who have lived it, keeping ascorbic acid injection (AAI) available to physicians has been...

Diseases of the Male Genital Urinary Tract – Prevention Is the Best Cure

Thomas A. Kruzel, ND Men begin to experience diseases of the prostate beginning with the onset of puberty and the physical, hormonal and biochemical maturation of the organs of reproduction....

The Truth About Pain – A Different Paradigm

by Hal S. Blatman, MD I played golf with sharp and disabling lower back pain for twenty-five years before I learned how to make it go away. Trigger point injections...

The Craving Cure: The Nutritional Solution to Our Worldwide Dietary Crisis

by Julia Ross Many of those coming to us for dietary help find it difficult or impossible to follow our suggestions because of their overpowering cravings. In fact, cravings for...

Myth Busting Common Misconceptions of Kidney Disease

by Dr. Jenna C. Henderson The kidneys may well be the most misunderstood of all the major organs.  Patients often fail to grasp the seriousness of their condition and, without...

A Push-Catch System That Enables Effective Detoxification

by Christopher Shade, PhD, and Carrie Decker, ND   The human body is exposed to environmental toxins every day from a wide array of sources: particulate matter and diesel fumes...

Stop Fixing the Adaptive Response: Why Cardiovascular Disease Should Be Named Chronic Scurvy

By Daniel Cobb, OMD Note: In this article, the terms "chronic scurvy," "heart disease," and "cardiovascular disease" (CVD) refer to the accumulation of damage, most commonly in the coronary arteries,...

Impact of TACT on Conventional Cardiovascular Therapy

by L. Terry Chappell, MD  Introduction After decades of conflict between conventional physicians and alternative doctors who recognized EDTA chelation therapy as an effective treatment for coronary artery disease, the...

Updates on the Treatment of Drug Addiction

by Carolyn Ross, MD, MPH Mark presented in my office in withdrawal from opiate use disorder (heroin). He reported using up to 2 grams a day of heroin intravenously. His...

Lithium: The Untold Story of the Magic Mineral That Charges Cell Phones and Preserves Memory

by James Greenblatt, MD, and Kayla Grossmann, RN As far as cosmologists can tell, there were only three elements present when the universe was first formed some 13.8 billion years...


Recent Blog Posts

How Effective Are Alternative Smoking Cessation Solutions?

It's common knowledge that cigarette smoking is bad for one’s health. Besides increasing the risk of fatal health conditions like cancer and heart disease, it can cause blindness and even...

Helicobactor Pylori… Friend AND Foe?

For almost four decades, we’ve been told that Helicobacter pylori is a nasty bacterium that causes gastritis, peptic ulcers, and gastric cancer.  But a June 2013 article in Townsend Letter,...

Brain Chatter

If you are fascinated by the brain, read My Stroke of Insight, one of the many wonderful books that I’ve reviewed for Townsend Letter over the years.1 The author, Jill...

Pharma Windfall

Pharma’s Windfall While the COVID-19 pandemic has decimated lives and livelihoods, the pharmaceutical industry has experienced a windfall—from the billions of dollars for experimental vaccines1 and their expensive new drugs...

Medical Shortage and COVID

Another Plea for Early COVID Treatment As I write this in late January, the local hospital here in South Carolina has been overrun with sick, COVID-positive patients for weeks. The...

The Power of the Small

I recently watched Symbiotic Earth – How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution, a documentary by John Feldman. Margulis, an evolutionary biologist, championed the idea that...

The High Cost of Pharma Bias

When COVID-19 first hit the US, I was surprised and happy to see the corporate news stories about the use of high-dose intravenous vitamin C as a treatment. But it...

Looking Past the Headlines

Several years ago, I wrote an article for Townsend Letter called “Bias, Research and Complementary & Alternative Medicine.”1 As part of the research for that article, I looked at how...

What is Health?

At the February 26, 2020, CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) discussion on an Ebola vaccine and its use in healthy people, this question arose: what is meant by...

Placebo Effect on Plants?

Have you ever tried an experiment that produced results beyond your wildest expectations? Late in March, I noticed that my little Meyer lemon tree, which had lived happily in its...

A Repeat of History?

When corporate media began inundating us with the message that millions will die from COVID-19, government leaders mandated “shelter-in-place” and quarantine measures, and Dr. Fauci said we must maintain this...

Bread, the Staff of Life?

I've met many people, including myself, who have found digestion improves and unwanted pounds disappear when bread is eliminated from the diet. Alan Gaby, MD, reports in his Literature Review...

Hydrotherapy

After an afternoon of yardwork, I’ll often enjoy a soak in a hot tub with Epsom salts to help relax sore muscles. But it’s only recently that I became aware...

The Hazy View of Environmental Protection

Three civil trials conducted against Monsanto (owned by Bayer) in recent years have awarded millions to plaintiffs. The plaintiffs, all of whom regularly used Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup for several years,...

Start with the Simple

A friend was experiencing daily diarrhea, no other symptoms. It was to the point that she worried about being too far from a bathroom. The diarrhea disappeared when she stopped...

Double-Blind Studies

Is the Gold Standard Fool’s Gold? Recently, my vet prescribed a new medication for my dog’s severe musculoskeletal pain. It didn’t seem to have any effect over the next week....

Sugar and Vitamin C

In the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, doctors in China and in New York have begun to use intravenous ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to treat hospitalized patients. But intravenous treatment...

Protesting 5G

Protesting 5G Climate change isn’t the only target for activism. A group of dedicated activists in my town are working to educate the city council about 5G wireless technology safety...

Affordable Care Act

by Jule Klotter It’s no surprise that health care affordability is still a hot topic for the Democrats seeking the 2020 nomination for president. Health care costs for pharmaceuticals and...

Getting It

by Jule Klotter In his book The Way of the Physician (1985), philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote: "…throughout history, we can see that [the relationship between doctor and patient] has been...

Shades of Planet of the Apes!

Katherine A. Carroll, Executive Director of National Health Federation, has written a piece about animal-human hybrids (chimeras) that are being engineered to fill the need for organs for transplant patients.1  Researchers...

Philosophy, Medicine, and Choices

Albert Einstein said: I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then...

Displacing Foods

This past summer, I was fortunate to attend the 2019 Cullowhee Native Plant Conference at Western Carolina University (NC) in the Smokey Mountains. I was raised a city girl and...

New Science Supports Homeopathy

Of all the various modalities used in complementary and alternative health care, homeopathy stands out as arguably the most controversial. Even at its beginning when German physician Samuel Hahnemann in...

Play in a Stressed-Out World

Do you have enough playtime in your everyday life? The older we get, the more responsibilities and must-do tasks demand our attention. Working adults tend to reject play as a...

Testing the Effect of Food on Multiple Sclerosis

Never underestimate the power of real food as medicine. Terry L. Wahls, MD, is the senior author on two 2017 clinical studies that looked at the use of lifestyle measures...

Herbicides and Antibiotic Resistance

The connection between cancer and glyphosate, the active ingredient in Bayer/Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, has been headline news over the past months. Juries have awarded multi-million-dollar awards to plaintiffs who claim...

Exercise, Sleep Quality, and Clock Genes

Yujiro Yamanaka and colleagues found that the time of day we exercise influences the autonomic nervous system. Their study involved 22 healthy young males; seven acted as the control group,...

The “Quack” Cancer Treatment That Showed Promise

Ideas or worldviews that challenge the dominant view have always been ignored—or if the spokesman talks too loudly—censored and punished. The history of cancer treatments is full of such stories....