Blooming Wellness
Dr. Eek's Health & Wellness Blog
One of the strangest chapters in medical history involves a treatment that sounds completely backwards today. People once smoked cigarettes to relieve asthma symptoms. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) Before modern rescue inhalers, “asthma cigarettes” were sold in pharmacies and prescribed by physicians. They weren’t ordinary tobacco cigarettes. Instead, …
For years, we’ve been obsessed with one number: The number on the scale. Lose weight? Great. Lose more weight? Even better. But that number doesn’t tell us what we’re losing. Fat? Water? Muscle? As medications like Zepbound (tirzepatide) help people lose substantial amounts of weight in record time, but researchers are asking a question that …
What if I told you your dog, a butterfly, or even an ant might know a thing or two about medicine? It sounds like the premise of a Disney movie written by an evolutionary biologist, but it’s actually a fascinating area of scientific research known as animal self-medication. In this episode of Causes or Cures, …
America has always had a love affair with celebrating freedom through controlled explosions. Today, we mostly worry about fireworks causing burns or sending someone to the emergency room. Some people will lose fingers, cuz they just don’t listen or they’re too drunk to listen. But around the turn of the 20th century, doctors feared something …
In the late 1800s, cocaine wasn’t just legal, it was found in a variety of medicines. One of the more surprising examples was cocaine toothache drops, which were sold over the counter to relieve dental pain. Watch my reel here: View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) The reason they worked …
If you’ve ever felt like you could “sense a storm coming” before a migraine, you’re not alone. Many people living with migraine report that changes in the weather, extreme heat, bright sunlight, or even poor air quality seem to trigger an attack. For years, these experiences were often dismissed as anecdotal. But a growing body …
And then there was…the Pop Rocks Myth. In the late 1970s, parents across America became convinced that mixing Pop Rocks candy and soda could make a child’s stomach explode. The rumor became so widespread that it even claimed “Little Mikey,” the boy from the popular Life cereal commercials, had died after eating Pop Rocks and …
Public Health is Weird… View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) If you think debates over masks are something new, history has other ideas. A long time ago, before COVID, there was a lot of fighting over the 1918 flu pandemics masks. During the 1918 pandemic, several U.S. cities required people …
Can your favorite playlist do more than lift your mood? Could listening to music actually help protect your brain as you age? In this episode of Causes or Cures, I sat down with Professor Joanne Ryan, a dementia researcher at Monash University, to explore what the latest science says about music, cognition, and healthy brain …
Welcome to Public Health Is Weird—a series where I dig up some of history’s strangest (but true) public health stories. This one is about shoe store x-rays. Watch the Reel View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) When X-Rays Became a Shoe Shopping Experience Imagine walking into a shoe store, slipping …
Can you live a happy, meaningful, and fulfilling life without a romantic partner? For many people, the answer seems obvious. Society often tells us that happiness comes from finding “the one,” getting married, and building a family. But is that actually what the research shows? In this episode of Causes or Cures, I sit down …
Imagine it’s a few weeks before Thanksgiving. The turkey is thawing. The relatives are coming. The cranberry sauce is ready. Then the federal government announces that some cranberries may contain a chemical linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Welcome to the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959. It’s one of the strangest food safety stories in …
