Jeff Rippey

Any of the various prescription and over the counter antihistamines would likely help. Be aware that most of these medications can possibly cause drowsiness.

A lot is going to depend on why you have fatty liver (alcoholic fatty liver/cirrhosis vs non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), how well you can manage the causal factors (diet and alcohol intake), and how progressed the problem is.

The liver is unique among organs in that, if enough of it is healthy, it can regenerate to a degree. I've worked with several NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) patients and, assuming we can get the diet under control, there is almost always some progress that can be made. A complete fix, in certain circumstances, is unrealistic.

If the sprain is not so severe that you can't tolerate weight on that side, yes, sometimes exercises can help speed things up.

There are potentially several things that might work:

1. Over the counter anti-nausea pills like Dramamine can help if the nausea isn't too severe. Dramamine can cause drowsiness, so keep that in mind.

2. Prescription anti-nausea like meclizine or scopolamine can also be effective. Some of these medications also have a tendency to cause drowsiness.

3. Acupuncture has a pretty good track record managing nausea. You'd want to try to get a treatment immediately before flying which is sometimes impractical.

4. Most pharmacies in the US sell a product called "Sea Bands". These go on the wrists and look like the old 70s-80s sweat bands. They have a small plastic protrusion on the inside that places pressure on a wrist point often used in acupuncture for the treatment of nausea. For some folks this is enough to get them through their trip.

If you have an infection, antibiotics are your best bet.

Sometimes, yes. I do a lot of work with insomnia and my experience has been that some patients have their sleep issues resolved in a few treatments while other patients have their sleep issues improved but require maintenance to keep the improvement.

The only way to figure out which bucket you're in (resolution vs maintenance) is to try treatment and see where you end up.

There are a least a couple ways to come at this. Are you a person who has some level of anxiety in your day to day and flying increases what's already a baseline level of daily anxiousness? Or are you a person who is relatively calm day to day and only experiences anxiety with air travel?

If you have day-to-day anxiety, getting treatment for that will lower your overall anxiety levels and should result in lowered anxiety around flying. Therapy, Chinese medicine, conventional prescription medication can all help to improve this situation.

If you are relatively anxiety free except when flying then you're probably looking at some combination of therapy and conventional prescription meds to manage things when you need to travel by air.

Sometimes, yes. A lot is going to depend on how disciplined you can be and what other health issues may create roadblocks.

The first thing I'd do is get with your primary care provider and get a full workup. At the same time you should get their opinion on exercise - whether or not you'd be clear to engage in some level of activity.

The next thing you need to do is adjust your diet. More than half of any weight loss is going to be diet driven - it is virtually impossible to out exercise a poor eating plan.

Different people do better or worse on different eating plans. There are a variety of ways you can approach this: vegetarian/vegan, keto, paleo, mediterranean, intermittent fasting. You're going to need to research these and try a few in order to see what works best for you and your situation. When I say try, I mean you're going to need to be serious about that eating style for at least 90 days.

There are meds on the market which can help. The GLP-1 receptor agonists (ozempic, trulicity, etc.) have been shown to help people eat less and lose weight. These meds have potential side-effects and it would be up to your primary care provider to decide whether or not they're appropriate for you.

If you're clear for exercise, start exercising. Walking, even short distances, consistently will help. Any sort of weight-bearing exercise will help to build muscle which will increase your overall metabolic rate. Look for low impact initially and ramp things up as the weight starts to come off.

Many people who struggle with weight have issues around food. Sometimes they grew up in a food insecure environment, sometimes they use food as a band-aid for other psychological injuries. Getting some therapy is often very beneficial for understanding why a person has certain behaviors around food, and therapy can help to change those behaviors.

Here's, at least in my opinion, the most important thing: you are going to fail and you're going to backslide. You have to be able to pick yourself up, realize what you were doing wasn't working, and try again. Obesity isn't going to be corrected in a few months; it's likely going to take you a year or two to get the weight off in a healthy way.

Severity of the anxiety/depression is often a player in what treatments might be effective. Usually it boils down to some combination of therapy, Chinese medicine, prescription medication.

I generally recommend most folks start with therapy and Chinese medicine. If that's not providing enough relief, then adding prescription medications is often necessary.

Without knowing the level of severity, it's hard to say. Chinese medicine has treatments for hemorrhoids. My experience is that these treatments are very effective for mild to moderate cases. If your situation is different, you may need to add some level of conventional medicine - either prescription medication or a procedure for removing the distended veins.

Sometimes, yes, chronic headache can be resolved. There are a variety of things that could potentially cause headache. Some of these things can be serious and/or require immediate intervention. Your first stop should be your primary care provider and, possibly, a neurologist - just to make sure.

After that, you have a variety of options.

Lifestyle can be a player in headache - repetitive motions, high stress situations, exposure to chemicals can all potentially cause chronic headache. Reducing/managing/eliminating these causes can sometimes have a big effect on headache.

Massage can help, especially if the headache is stress based.

Physical therapy can help if the headache is related to posture or repetitive motion.

Acupuncture and Chinese medicine can help with just about any headache cause.

Prescription medication can help.

There can be serious health consequences to going without sleep for extended periods or experiencing very poor sleep for extended periods.

There are a variety of potential treatments. Lifestyle and "sleep hygiene" changes, over the counter sleep aids, prescription sleep aids, acupuncture and Chinese medicine, or some combination of all the above.

I do a lot of work with neuropathy. Assuming you're someone who responds to acupuncture, there is probably some level of improvement that can be made.

How much improvement you might reasonably expect is going to be dependent on how much damage has been done, how long the damage has been present, and what caused the damage in the first place.

I have a pretty good track record resolving seasonal allergy using acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Depending on the person and the severity of the allergy, it can be a long process.

Yes, it's possible that a case of bronchitis could leave lingering issues with breathing. You don't say how long it has been since you had bronchitis, but depending on the age of the patient and the severity of the initial issue it can sometimes take a few weeks to completely recover.

If you are more than 2 or 3 weeks out from your initial bout of bronchitis and you're still having problems, you should make an appointment with your primary care provider to get evaluated.

The risk with UTI is that the infection moves up the ureters into the kidneys. Left untreated this can result in kidney infection which can impair kidney function, cause sepsis, and result in death.

I've had patients try to catch UTIs early and treat with things like cranberry juice. Sometimes this will work and sometimes it won't. I strongly suggest if you have a UTI or think you may have a UTI that you go and have a urinary analysis done. If you're positive for bacteria in the urine, get on antibiotics. A short course usually clears things up.

Chronic pain is almost always more difficult to work with relative to acute pain. At lot is going to depend on why the pain exists and how long the pain has been present.

Assuming a good response to treatment, there's almost always a level of improvement that can be made. Whether the pain can be relieved permanently or managed would be an open question - I'd need a lot more information than this format provides to give an opinion.

Whether things can be healed and the degree of healing that might occur are going to be directly dependent on what, exactly, is causing the pain in the first place.

Assuming you're someone who responds to acupuncture, treatment will almost certainly result in a reduction or elimination of the pain. How much healing occurs on the back side of the pain relief is anyone's guess.

Having some sort of imaging (xray/MRI) that gives your provider some idea what's going on to cause the pain will do two things:

1. It helps practitioners figure out or refine their treatment approach.
2. It will help to level set how much healing might happen and what we can do to maximize that.

The problem with most types of hypertension is that they fall into a category labeled "idiopathic" which is just a fancy way of saying, "We don't have any idea why this happens". When you don't know what's causing the problem, it's difficult to apply a fix.

Chinese medicine and acupuncture are sometimes more successful with issues like hypertension because we have a diagnostic category that covers the cause of the problem - though that diagnostic category has no meaning to anyone outside of Chinese medicine. Even with that, I've had patients who still required a certain level of maintenance in order to keep their blood pressure in a desirable range.

Most patients still consider it a win if we end up in maintenance because it's typically one treatment every 4-6 weeks vs a daily pill.

There are a variety of options for managing allergy/allergic rhinitis.

1. Over the counter allergy medication
2. Prescription allergy medication
3. Allergy shots
4. Acupuncture and Chinese medicine

Which one you choose depends on your comfort level with that type of treatment and availability of properly trained, licensed providers in your area.