Dr. Mark Rosenbloom calls himself an “age management physician,” as his Northbrook-based medical practice, LIFEFORCE Medical Institute is dedicated to preventing and reversing the symptoms of aging. So, is he offering his patients the fountain of youth?

“I help men and women who are suffering get their life back and enjoy life again,” said Rosenbloom, a Northwestern University Medical School graduate who, before starting LIFEFORCE four years ago, spent two decades working as an emergency doctor. “I help them function more normally, with more confidence and more overall happiness.”

Using Bio Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy, along with dietary consultations, exercise programs, support programs and pharmaceutical-grade supplements, Rosenbloom said his goal for every patient is to get his or her hormone levels to where they were at a much younger age and help them improve their overall health and fitness level.

“We tackle everything at once,” said Rosenbloom, who lives in Highland Park with his wife, MaryLynn, and who also holds an MBA from Stanford University. “Every patient is complex, so I like making order of the chaos in people’s lives. Those who follow my program usually do great and are happy with the results.”

Rosenbloom, who has also been an instructor and assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Northwestern, said his typical patient is a man or a woman between the ages of 40 and 60 who has symptoms such as depression, anxiety, poor sleep patterns, fatigue, digestive issues, weight gain, mood swings and low sex drive, most likely caused by a combination of unbalanced hormones and the need for lifestyle and body changes.

Patients fill out an extremely detailed questionnaire and undergo many of the tests before even seeing Rosenbloom for the first time.

“I spend a minimum of an hour to look at their forms and their labs so when they come in, I feel I already know them somewhat,” he said. “A regular doctor will see you for 15 minutes and only has time to deal with your immediate symptoms.”

Rosenbloom also uses dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, also known as a DEXA scan, for measurements that include bone density, muscle mass per body part and fat mass. He said these results help in deciding what course of treatment the patient needs.

Rick Madeja of Kenosha has been a patient of Rosenbloom for six months, initially contacting him for a second opinion.

“I started feeling my age,” said the 51-year-old husband and father. “I’ve been athletic all my life and I just wasn’t feeling right, so I went to my doctor and was told it was normal, but I didn’t want to accept that.”

After an array of testing, including the DEXA scan, Madeja was diagnosed by Rosenbloom with vitamin and hormone deficiencies, and was treated with hormone therapy and supplements.

“I’m in sales and I live and die by my numbers,” Madeja said. “I was given adrenal support and I feel great. I have that drive again to do what I need to do in my job, and it’s also helped me with my marriage and my family.”

When asked about ongoing controversy regarding hormone therapy, Rosenbloom said:

“More and more information keeps coming out that discredits the conclusion of the major study done in the early 2000s that made everyone nervous. I only prescribe bio-identical hormones, not synthetic hormones. They are more effective and much safer, because they are identical in molecular structure to the hormones made in human bodies.”

LIFEFORCE accepts medical insurance for testing and prescriptions, but not for office visits.

“He’s very interested in making sure you get the help you need,” said Madeja. “For a 51-year-old guy, I feel great. I feel younger, my workouts are better, and I just have so much more energy and drive, both in my professional and personal life.”

LIFEFORCE Medical Institute

60 Revere Drive Ste. 820

(847) 905-9505

Lifeforcemed.com

Nancy Nagy, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices KoenigRubloff Realty Group, has announced Katie Roberts as assistant managing broker of the company’s Glenview, Deerfield and Lincoln Park Webster offices. Roberts began her real estate career with the company eleven years ago. Katie is a lifelong resident of the North Shore and is an alumna of Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette. She earned a degree in social work at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Combined Insurance, a leading provider of individual supplemental accident, disability, health and life insurance products, and an ACE Group Company, has named Nancy Maloy senior vice president, market initiatives. This newly created role will bring together product innovation, product management, and marketing under coordinated leadership. Maloy joined Combined Insurance in early 2013, most recently serving as vice president and actuary overseeing product pricing. Prior to moving to Illinois, Maloy spent twenty years at Physicians Mutual in Omaha, Neb. There she served as chief actuary until moving to the operations area as senior vice president of operations, where she managed the underwriting, policyholder services and claims division. Additionally, she worked as an actuary pricing life and annuity products for Allstate Life Insurance Company.

Allstate agency owner John Tunnell recently received the Agency Hands in the Community Award for his commitment to helping others. With this award came a $1000 grant from The Allstate Foundation for Bateman Elementary School in Chicago, where Tunnell volunteers.

At a New York City event a few weeks ago, Gerald McCarthy, a Dominican University professor of marketing and management, joined the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame for outstanding leadership at Zenith – one of the industry’s iconic brands.

Does your company have news about grand openings, hires, promotions, awards or recognitions? Email your items to Biz Notes at biznotes@pioneerlocal.

Under its new chairman Brien Sheahan, the Illinois Commerce Commission voted Wednesday to raise Peoples Gas bills despite pleas from residents not to increase rates, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The exact amount that would be reflected in customer bills was being calculated Wednesday morning but is expected to be less than $5 per month for Peoples Gas customers and less than $2.50 per month for North Shore customers. The increases take effect Feb. 1.

Chicagoans who spoke at the meeting urged the commission not to increase rates. One man called the utility “greedy money-changers.”

Click here to read the full story on the Chicago Tribune.

Dear Help Squad,

I’m hoping you might be able to help me in my fight with La-Z-Boy over the purchase of a recliner. I have had over three months worth of interaction with “Customer Care.” I really don’t know what to do next. PLEASE, PLEASE help me return this chair that now sits unused in my living room. I am simply exhausted!

Thank you,
Pam, Huntley

Help Squad asked Pam to provide more information on the issue she was experiencing with her new recliner. In response, Pam sent a very detailed log documenting every interaction she had had with La-Z-Boy from the chair’s purchase on Aug. 9, to La-Z-Boy’s several attempts at repair, to her complete exasperation on Dec. 23, following several requests for a full refund.

Below is a summary of her saga:

• 8/9/14 Pam ordered “the chair of her dreams,” a leather Pinnacle Power Recliner XR+, for $2024.29.

• 9/17/14 The chair was delivered. Immediately after sitting in the chair, Pam was “horrified by how badly it hurt my back. It felt like a brick in my lumbar area!” She was told by the store there was nothing they could do; La-Z-Boy Customer Care would have to schedule a technician to come out.

• 10/1/14 A technician from Advantage came to Pam’s home, looked at the chair without sitting in it, took pictures and stated it met company standards.

• 10/8/14 Customer Care called and said there was nothing wrong with the chair. Pam asked for a refund and was denied. Following a lengthy conversation, Pam was told she would receive a new back cushion.

• 10/20/14 Pam received, not a new back cushion, but two large bags of stuffing that required another visit from Advantage to remove and replace the seat back’s innards.

• 11/3/14 Upon replacing the stuffing, the Advantage technician informed Pam there had been several complaints about this particular recliner. For a short time the new stuffing provided Pam some relief from her recliner’s “brick-like” lumbar support, but within two weeks the cushion compacted.

• 11/17/14 Pam called Customer Care again, and again Advantage was scheduled for a house call. Said Pam, “By now I felt like I was in the movie Groundhog Day!”

• 12/12/14 No call or visit from Advantage resulted from Pam’s November 17 call to Customer Care. Pam was furious. She contacted a Customer Care manager and demanded a full refund. She asked “What does La-Z-Boy’s motto ‘Live Life Comfortably’ mean?”

According to Pam, the manager responded, “Ma’am, we do not guarantee comfort.” An Advantage technician arrived that afternoon to inspect and sit in the recliner. He agreed the chair was not comfortable.

• 12/19/14 A La-Z-Boy Customer Care representative called Pam after receiving Advantage’s report. Pam was told her chair was up to code. Pam expressed her expletive-sprinkled disbelief and was asked by Customer Care if she would like a manager to call her back.

As of Jan. 15, 2015, Pam still had not heard from a La-Z-Boy manager. On Jan. 16, Help Squad called La-Z-Boy Customer Care and was immediately referred to Amy Hellebuyck, manger of brand marketing and public relations. Help Squad explained Pam’s situation to Amy and forwarded Pam’s detailed call log.

The next morning Help Squad received the following email: “I’ve worked with our escalation team to address this matter. [T]he team will be contacting the customer today to pick up the chair and issue a full refund. We believe this will help resolve the issue!”

Pam was thrilled! But then … the scheduled pick-up day came and went with no pick up.

The next morning Help Squad got back in touch with Amy. She very quickly looked into the situation and less than four hours later the chair was picked up. By that evening a full refund had been posted to Pam’s credit card.

Need help?
Did a utilities company overcharge you? Did a boutique deny your request for a return? Are you the victim of fraudulent business practices? Is someone just exhibiting bad business behavior? Let Help Squad make the call for you. Send your letters, your complaints, your injustices and your story ideas to HelpSquad@pioneerlocal.com and we will be happy to help you.

As if preparing your taxes isn’t time-consuming and hectic enough, the recent news of IRS budget cuts that could result in slower tax refunds, worse customer service and less identity-theft protection is probably adding more stress for taxpayers this season.

But attorneys Kris Ruben and Myrna Goldberg, founders of their Northbrook law firm, Ruben & Goldberg, say they’re on top of the change and they plan to make sure their tax clients have the least chance of being affected.

“Filing an accurate return is more important than ever to ensure minimal interaction with the IRS,” said Goldberg, a University of Michigan law school graduate who has been practicing law for 27 years. “We’re really good about looking at our clients prior returns to ensure the most accurate return possible.”

“We are also telling our clients to file early because later in the season, as they get busier, it will take the IRS longer to get the refund checks out,” said Ruben, who is a graduate of ITT Chicago Kent Law School and has been an attorney since 1991.

Ruben also explained that the earlier people file their returns, the less chance they have of being victims of someone else filing falsely for them.

Income tax preparation is only one of Ruben & Goldberg’s areas of expertise. The firm also handles estate planning, real estate, and corporate law.

“Over the years we’ve developed somewhat of a niche in helping people with transitions in life,” said Goldberg, who lives in Northbrook with her husband, Cary, and their two children and who met Ruben several years ago through their children’s school. “We handle clients whose spouse has passed away or who have a parent with dementia, or who are going through a divorce. It’s a lot of handholding.”

Ruben, who is divorced, said she knows firsthand how it feels, and therefore has a good perspective and a lot of empathy for clients in that situation.

“I feel like I can get them started on the right path with financial issues, estate planning, real estate taxes— everything except being their divorce attorney,” she said. “Many clients come to see us and they have never filed a tax return, they don’t know what assets they have, they might want to sell their home and don’t know how, and they don’t understand wills and trusts.”

Ralph and Holly Love of Glenview have been clients of the firm for 10 years and have worked with both Ruben and Goldberg on tax preparation and real estate transactions.

“They’re so easy to work with and they don’t treat you like you’re on the clock,” said Ralph Love. “They’re willing to really sit down and talk with you and explain things.”

Love said he recently worked with Goldberg on the closing of his daughter’s condo.

“The state had changed a law and the seller didn’t realize it, but Myrna made sure it got done correctly,” he said. “Everything was lined up.”

“They work like I do,” said Dawn Miller, a realtor at Koenig Rubloff in Glenview, who has referred several clients to Ruben & Goldberg. “If I have a thought at 11 o’clock at night, I e-mail them and they respond immediately. If my client has a question, Myrna and Kris are ahead of me. They’ve thought of everything. They work through all the scenarios and I never have to worry.”

When asked how they managed to reach the milestone of 10 years in business, Goldberg had this to say: “We’re approachable and people feel comfortable with us. We’re not uptight, and we really have a passion to help people.”

“They’re just nice people,” Love said. “And they’re smart.”

Ruben & Goldberg

3000 Dundee Road

(847) 790-7625

rglegal.biz

Thomas W. Begg Jr. of Indian Head Park, director of security life safety for the AON Center in Chicago was awarded the Security Professional of the Year Award by the Building Owners & Managers Association of Chicago. Begg has been employed by Jones Lang LaSalle at the AON Center for more than 10 years.

Des Plaines Office Equipment, the Chicago area’s leading provider of managed print services, managed network services, and related technology, has joined the M-Files Corporation Partner Program. As an M-Files partner, Des Plaines Office Equipment joins more than 375 other partners in more than 80 countries.

The Chicago advertising industry honored David Selby, president of Schafer Condon Carter, with the Chicago Advertising Federation Silver Medal award for his career and community accomplishments on Jan. 22 at a gala luncheon in Chicago.

John L. D’Angelo Jr., vice president of engineering and facilities operations at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, has been named the new vice president for facilities at Northwestern University, effective Feb. 16. D’Angelo will be responsible for the development and management of the Evanston and Chicago campuses and will play an advisory, high-level, oversight role for the Doha campus in Qatar. He was chosen after a national search to succeed former Vice President Ron Nayler, who retired in December.

First Bank & Trust is honored to announce that two of its top executives – Senior Vice President of Commercial Banking Michael Corr and Vice President of Banking and Branch Manager David Putrus – both recently began terms as presidents of the Evanston Skokie chambers of commerce, respectively.

Lake Zurich resident, long-time Comcast employee and project management and process improvement expert Wendy Liu has been named to the newly created position of vice president of Customer Experience for Comcast’s Greater Chicago Region, which includes Central and Northern Illinois, Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan.

Does your company have news about grand openings, hires, promotions, awards or recognitions? Email your items to Biz Notes at biznotes@pioneerlocal.

For your consideration: a new way of looking at Northbrook’s downtown.

Village staff is compiling a list of events and other public information opportunities to explain the possibilities of a new “form-based” downtown zoning code that could eventually transform Northbrook’s central business area.

Meetings will also be held to confer about the proposed Village Green Districts Regulations with downtown business owners.

The staff is moving at the behest of the trustees of the Village Board, not all of whom are on board with a draft of a new downtown zoning code. Trustees discussed the matter for a couple of hours at a Jan. 20 committee meeting.

They’re scheduled to do that again after public input, and before the code is sent to the Northbrook Plan Commission for formal public hearings. What form that public input will take hasn’t yet been decided, officials said.

The draft is intended as a vehicle to prevent what some trustees admit is their own –  perhaps unavoidable – unpredictability in ruling within the bounds of the current set of downtown codes. Those standards require consensus to make major changes in codes for almost any significant project. So, some officials say, many developers give up early or never even try.

For instance, Northbrook downtown codes restrict most blocks to two stories without special permits, so getting more floors – more floor space per costly square foot of land – has been a question that is hard to predict an answer for.

The proposed code has answers to that question, allowing heights of five stories in most parts of the downtown. Notable exceptions include the east edge, around Shermer and Waukegan roads, the Meadows (Sunset Foods) Shopping Plaza, and Shermer Road south of downtown proper.

The code has been under construction for about a year by the Downtown Zoning Committee, an ad hoc group chaired by Northbrook Plan Commissioner Scott Cyphers, with the aid of a consultant and a grant from the Regional Transportation Authority. While still unfinished, it has served to inform the planning of at least two projects that have come to Village Hall.

The most recent of these is the Jacobs home plans for 52 or 82 townhouses on Shermer Road east of Church Street, depending on how much property the builder is able to get under contract. Not only was the idea of townhouses promoted in the village’s Comprehensive Plan, but the heights of two and three stories are welcomed in the draft code, and that information was communicated by village officials, they said.

January’s early Jacobs plans also show townhouses lining up a relatively short distance from the curb, another facet of the draft code, which discourages building far back, behind yards or parking fields.

One of the members of the downtown committee is Selwyn Marcus, owner of the block of commercial and office buildings on the opposite side of Shermer Road, in the 1100 and 1200 blocks. Those buildings have long served as examples of what Northbrook officials say they like best in the village’s spare downtown.

His long-awaited plans for an infill building at 1312 Shermer, approved by trustees last year, was similarly hailed. Its three-story height is anticipated in the draft code’s plans for the area, and some of the lessons learned in the public hearing process that led to its approval have been added to the code.

Plan Commissioner Susan Elfant – also a committee member – successfully pushed for windows and other architectural features on the exposed south face of the building. Requirements for such features are now part of the draft code.

Much of the proposed code has to do with how new buildings would look. There are standards for setbacks, materials, and components. For instance, a balcony can’t have a tacked-on look, but must be an integral part of the facade.

The code also takes into account one of the big differences Northbrook’s downtown has with more successful downtowns: not enough street frontage. It includes a “blue-sky” concept for a road that would cut across the south end of the Meadow (Starbucks) Shopping Center and another plan that would bisect it into two uneven portions, east and west.

Trustee Todd Heller found the concept of the roads too much to accept at the Jan. 20 session. He said that the Meadow Shopping Center is doing well with plenty of tenants, and the idea of a new road shouldn’t be expressed in the code, even conceptually.

“I’m not sure that what we’re trying to do here is the right thing to do,” he said. “I’m concerned that what we’re trying to do here is engineering what we want the downtown to be. I don’t know if what we have here is a vision or a fantasy or a goal.”

He noted that one of the most innovative retail businesses to come to the village in years was Pinstripes, and it didn’t need a new code to bring  bocce, bowling and dining service to 1150 Willow Road.

Heller said he doesn’t think that predictability is worth creating a new, stricter code.

Fellow Trustee Robert Israel noted that Pinstripes, though it needed variances, had been built in the comparatively wide-open spaces of Techny, not downtown Northbrook.

Downtown committee member Steve Elisco, also a plan commissioner, differed with Heller on the Meadow Shopping Center, noting after the meeting that it has had several long-standing vacancies in recent years and has been slow to keep up the parking lot’s maintenance.

Trustee Michael Scolaro was less critical of the proposals than Heller, but said Jan. 20 that he also is wary about most of the code. He said, “The most fascinating thing about it is this idea that you get to know who your neighbors are.”

He referred to the idea that not only would the code guide developers more closely in what is permissible, but it would restrain neighbors, so property owners would be confident of the future “without someone building Space Mountain next door.”

Scolaro said that “the only thing that makes sense is the structured parking on the Metra lot,” a possibility woven into the code document, which also shows a picture of a multi-story parking garage with stores and offices on the ground floor.

“Can you build us this parking garage?” quipped Israel.

Opinions of the other Village Board members ran the gamut of acceptance.

Village President Sandy Frum said she supports most of the code already, and absent Trustee James Karagianis wrote to his fellows that he found the document “generally appropriate,” but he wanted to “hear what the Plan Commission had to say.”

Elisco, an architect, told trustees that difficulties developing downtown “go back to 2000.”

That was about the time that he and other Northbrook Chamber members worked on a task force that found that even the simplest Northbrook permit processes took about four months.

That time was shortened but the fact remains, he said, that developers won’t get behind expensive planning work in downtown Northbrook with the uncertainty endemic to the current zoning code.

Not, he said, when “we don’t know what we want.”