DrKrupka.com

All right, let's discuss homocysteine. It's a test we do on all of our annual physical panels. I think it's a pretty important test. Everybody ought to have it done at least once a year. If you've got issues with it more often than that. To keep an eye on it, I'm going to go through and explain why we test it, what it is, why it matters, what the normal range is, and what we do about it when it's out of range. So you're going to kind of get an all encompassing little primer on homocysteine right here. Whether you've gotten it from one of your other doctors or whether you have a test from me and you don't remember our discussion about it when we went over it, this will be a good way for you to either revisit that or look at what you've gotten from your other doctor and interpret it on your own.

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Alright, so what is homocysteine? First of all, H-O-M-O-C-Y-S-T-E-I-N-E homocysteine. It is what we call an intermediate product in a pathway that pro...

An article crossed my desk yesterday that I want to summarize and explain to you. It's about the antiviral properties of an herb called artemisinin. Common name would be sweet wormwood, but you see it as artemisinin quite a bit when you're looking at it in its herbal form. How does it have antiviral properties? Why do we care?

Artemisinin has been used for decades as an antiviral treatment, anti-malaria treatment in other parts of the world. We know it works. It has a good history, good reputation. Lots of people use it. It's very safe. But mechanistically, how does it do that? That's more what this article is dealing with. We know it works. Now we have a better idea how, but let me give you a real quick virology 101.

The way a virus works. First of all, it's not alive. You can't kill it like a bacteria. Antibiotics don't do anything for it. It doesn't work that way. It is a box that delivers genetic material. It lands on the outside of a cell, injects its genetic mate...