Health

Bob Robinson and his wife, Sherry, moved backed to East Texas and now enjoy spending time at their lake house and with their 6-year-old grandson. However, in 2010, Bob started to feel extremely fatigued and overall less-than stellar, which led him to speak to his primary care physician. The results came back, giving him a life-changing diagnosis.

Bob was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is a lifelong disease that affects the way your body handles glucose, a kind of sugar, in your blood. People with type 2 diabetes make insulin, but their cells don't use it as well as they...

Last year, at age 68, Steve Skommesa and his wife, Susan, relocated to East Texas. They did all the normal things you do when you move like forward your mail, meet the neighbors and find the closest grocery store, but he also set up an appointment with his new UT Health primary care physician’s assistant, Tony Jameson.

After doing a routine physical, Jameson saw that Steve’s cholesterol level was a bit elevated and suggested a next step. “He asked if I had 150 dollars,” Steve recalls. “Then he said I should take...

When the conversation of weight is brought up, it’s not always as straightforward as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) between 18-25 kg/m2. Instead, it’s more important to find a point where a person’s weight isn’t having a negative impact on his or her health. “Studies have shown that a 5-10 percent weight reduction can reduce the chance of developing diabetes by as much as 50 percent,” says Dr. Katherine Root, internal and obesity medicine physician at UT Health East Texas. “With this in mind, a goal of losing 5 percent body weight is a good place to start.”

Dr. James Menard,...

If you smoke, you hear certain things on repeat: how you need to quit, how expensive the habit is and how bad it is for your health. All of these things are true, but it’s also true that quitting can be exceptionally hard and may take several attempts. Thirty-eight million adults smoke in the United States, and rural areas in East Texas have the highest numbers of smokers in the state. If you are considering...