There is no mandatory testing of doctors as we age, although many of us think there should be some sort of evaluation as we get to some ripe old age, say 70, or perhaps even younger. I think that should also hold true, by the way, for anyone in a position of authority, such as […]
An interesting study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology concerned the reality that even the practice of oncology, that is, taking care of people with cancer, is very ageist. It all begins with one pretty damning statistic: Although 2/3 of people with cancer are over the age of 65 (after all, the rate of nearly […]
If you already have atrial fibrillation (AF) or if you’re worried about it, and if you’re aging, you should definitely at least consider the prospect you may end up with AF, then you may – actually, you should – either learn to abstain from alcohol or at the very least, significantly cut down on how […]
Full disclosure: I’m totally biased – I’m old and every old person is biased because, well, we’ve learned, haven’t we? But you know what? That is also true for every young person and every not-young-anymore-but-not-yet-old-either person, too. Anyway, the reason there is so much age discrimination in medicine – much more than for any other […]
According to the background to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, (American) national guidelines recommend that “men with prostate cancer eat a vegetable-rich diet”, to which I first have to say that I had no idea that there were such things as “national” guidelines, only guidelines issued by specific […]
The easiest way for a doctor to get an old person out their office? Easy: Give them a prescription. Or three. Or even 6 or 7. And sadly, sometimes more than 10. So no wonder that no matter what group of drugs researchers look at, they invariably find that all patients are getting too much […]
According to a recent analysis of 677,423 human body temperatures from three different populations, men born 200 years ago had body temperatures about 0.59°C higher than men today, while today’s women have a body temperature on average 0.32°C lower than women born in the 1890s. In other words, we’re not as hot as used to […]
According to a new study from the US, the rate of ischemic strokes (ones caused by a blood clot to the brain as opposed to hemorrhagic strokes which aer due to burst blood vessels in the brain) are increasing among a group you don’t ordinarily associate with strokes, namely women during their pregnancies or in […]
Ran across this interesting bit of information from a study done in Germany and published in the International Journal of Geriatric Society. It’s all to do with the intriguing theory t that “smell training” may help prevent or perhaps even slow the progress of dementia. In this small un-blinded study of 91 people, some of […]
So everyone should know by now that alcohol is a pretty potent carcinogen. But in fact, according to a recent American survey only about 25 % of people know that alcohol raises the risk of cancer. So let me repeat: Alcohol raises the risk of many cancers, perhaps most notoriously breast cancer (“notoriously” because at […]