Live Well Clinic

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that this year’s flu vaccine is not effective against the current flu strain. While this may be cause for alarm for some as we approach the peak of flu season, I am confident using other flu prevention tools will be more effective than the flu vaccine. The influenza vaccine is recommended annually for everyone older than six months of age, but just how effective is it? The flu vaccine is comprised of the three or four strains of flu most likely to be seen in a given season. The flu vaccine tends to not work very well if the strains of flu in the vaccine do not match the strains of flu in the current environment. However, on the rare occasion that the matching strain are   perfect, 1% of flu-vaccinated individuals still end up with an infection, compared to 4% of unvaccinated individuals. In the case of a partial strain match, 1% of individuals still end up with an infection versus 2% of unvaccinated individu...

Living in one of the sunniest places in the world doesn’t protect us from Vitamin D deficiency. As summer comes to the desert we tend to migrate indoors spending as much time as we can away from the scorching sun, meanwhile depriving our bodies of the most important hormone in our body: Vitamin D. Believe it or not, you can get vitamin D from sunshine. The skin produces vitamin D when hit by ultraviolet light from the sun. Vitamin D deficiency is increasing nationwide at a staggering rate. Experts estimate that more than half of adults and 30 percent of children and teens in the United States are vitamin D deficient, according to the report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. So why do I need Vitamin D? According to the Vitamin D Council Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in “the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chroni...