If you’re trying to protect your heart, you probably already know the things you should do: Eat a healthy diet, get plenty of exercise, manage your weight, minimize stress and make sure you’re seeing your doctor regularly.

But there are other things that can put you at risk for heart disease that you may not even be aware of. Some of them are really unusual (such as living near noisy roads) while others (like crinkled ear lobes) can help identify people at risk earlier than cholesterol tests or blood pressure screenings.

Of all the things we eat, nothing perhaps does more harm than foods that are awash in sugar, items that come to mind include:

• Cakes
• Cookies
• Sugar-sweetened beverages (like gourmet coffee and sodas)

 But sugar is everywhere — in low-fat yogurt and barbecue sauces, in granola, protein bars and canned soup, in canned fruit, smoothies and even spaghetti sauce and ketchup.

In the 1800s, nearly 200,000 Chinese immigrants came to the U.S. to work on the railroads. They brought with them Eastern medicine practices that dated back thousands of years including oil made from a Chinese water snake. The oil was used to treat the sore joints of workers after a long, grueling day of laying track and leveling grades.

Living longer and healthier isn’t always about exercise and healthy eating. While these things are important and account for a huge part of our health span - the period of our lives we live without chronic conditions and mobility issues -- there are other factors that play a big role too, including our relationships.

When I was in school growing up in New York, hardly anybody had food allergies. Nobody sat alone at an allergy table, and peanut butter was practically cuisine du jour. A lot has changed.

Today, food allergies affect a growing number of American adults – about 2 percent. They cause 30,000 emergency room visits and 2,000 hospitalizations each year, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

For the last few years, hospital workers have generally had only one respiratory illness to focus on – COVID. Patients hospitalized due to respiratory Illness like flu, RSV and pneumonia (unrelated to COVID) were actually kind of rare.

Do you see your dentist regularly? If you do, good for you. Unfortunately, only about two-thirds of Americans have seen their dentists in the last 12 months. That’s bad for their teeth, and it may also be bad for their heart.

That’s because there’s a link between what’s going on in your mouth and what’s going on with your heart. We’ve known for a while that if you have periodontal disease, a common infection that leads to swollen, red and tender gums, you are 49 percent more likely to have a heart attack.

Do you like sleeping in on the weekends? Many of us look forward to staying under the covers on our Saturdays and Sundays, especially after a late night or a long week. The extra shuteye helps us recover from missed sleep during the week.

Or so we think. Unfortunately, this kind of inconsistent sleep pattern has consequences for our health – from our relationships to our diet, and, perhaps most importantly, our heart. And trying to catch up on the weekends doesn’t seem to help.

If you’ve ever cared for a loved one who has been diagnosed with cancer or leukemia or experienced an event that’s life-threatening, you may heard their physicians use terms like curative care, palliative care and hospice care. They’re common terms applied to the care approach we use in latter stages of our lives.

But what do they mean and how are they applied?

Curative Care (also known as Therapeutic Care)

Curative care seeks to cure acute illnesses and heals injuries. This is the kind of care you receive throughout your life.

As an internal medicine physician for 36 years, I was never fond of New Year’s resolutions. They always seemed artificial and destined to fail. And if you’ve ever made one, you probably know what I’m talking about.

In fact, about 45 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions each year, but by February, 80 percent of them have failed. Only eight percent of people who make resolutions maintain them through the end of the year. But every year we still set “temporal” goals tied to some event — the flip of a calendar or the start of a semester.