Get Dr La Puma's Healthy Bites & Weekly Wows in your inbox to help you feel your best inside and out. Insights, healthy recipes and recommended household, culinary, literary, botanical and natural products to make your life easier, healthier and more fun.
What if I told you that the right kind of sound or music could reduce pain and stress, help with symptoms of depression and schizophrenia, improve the social skills of children with autism, and even aid folks with dementia? Welcome to another installment in my “What is EcoMedicine?” series, [...]
You may have heard of care farms before, especially if you read last year’s popular blog on care farms. It’s a fantastically innovative idea bridging health and nature that I think we’ll see a lot more of in the coming years. But when a farm environment is also offering [...]
What if I told you that the right plant inside your home or office can reduce stress, improve productivity, and save you a bundle in medical expenses? Greening the indoors is an ecomedicine practice which can be integrated into almost any lifestyle. Welcome to another installment in my “What [...]
What if I told you that the right kind of light could help cure your depression, improve your sleep, and even mitigate the symptoms of dementia? This form of ecomedicine might be what you need to treat seasonal affective disorder — more commonly known as the aptly-acronymed SAD. Welcome [...]
“Oh, my aching joints!” There’s good reason why we hear this so often. Osteoarthritis, known as OA, is the most common musculoskeletal disease in the world and a prevalent factor in work absences, temporary or permanent disability, hospital admissions, and use of pain-management [...]
Imagine lying on a massage table, a thick layer of mud smoothed across your skin with long deep strokes to help it sink in. For thousands of years, traditional medicine has considered “mudding” (aka a mud bath or mud wrap) therapeutic for the skin, joints, muscles, and the mind. [...]
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m a huge advocate for ecomedicine and nature therapy. In fact, the biggest problem I have with nature therapy? Not enough people know about it… including hydrotherapy. Welcome to another installment in “What is EcoMedicine?”, a series of [...]
Assessing your consumption and making choices based on actual need is essential to being a good steward of Earth’s resources. Regenerative use of herbs means researching how the plants are sourced, harvested and stored and determining what you will use in a reasonable amount of time. Choose [...]
You’ve definitely heard about sustainable agriculture or sustainable food systems before. Sustainability is a popular idea amongst environmentally conscious folks and can be applied to food, health, nature, industry, and more. The general idea behind sustainability is to leave your little [...]
On the right side of your abdomen, just under the ribcage, is the gallbladder. A small pear-shaped organ, it supports the body’s detoxification process and, working with other organs, is crucial to the digestion of certain foods, particularly fatty foods. It’s important to understand [...]