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When today’s boomers, not to mention today’s pre-boomers (the new-chic word for geezer) were young, stress had not been invented. Oh, moms got frazzled with everything, dads (and occasionally moms too) came home bushed after a long hard day at the office, office buddies groused about too much work for too little pay – but nobody had figured out that Stress was messing with our lives.

Now we know.

Over on the PositScience site – this is a company that follows such things – Karen Merzenich reports on a Wired magazine article by Jonah Lehrer; it’s not online yet, but parts have been on Lehrer’s own blog. Lehrer has found, in talking with primatologist Robert Sapolsky, that stress is bad for one’s health even if one happens to be a baboon

Throughout decades of research studying baboon populations in Africa, Saposkly noticed that low social position created stress and poorer health in some of the baboons. Studies in humans have shown much the same thing. Specifically, things like having a mean boss or not having any control over your work contribute to a sustained stress response in your brain which negatively affects health and longevity. To paraphrase, Lehrer essentially says that stress doesn’t make you sick- but if you are sick, it will make it worse.

This news comes not long after an article in Psychology Today, by Howard Fillit M.D., about stress and its long-terms effects:

Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of chronic stress can accumulate and become a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Several studies have shown that stress, and particularly one’s individual way of reacting to stress (the propensity to become “dis-stressed” often found in neurotic people for example), increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

For boomers, pre-boomers, elders and geezers, if stress has been accumulating all these years, it’s probably a good time to change. Perhaps, just chill out. Chilling out is something else that wasn’t invented until after stress was… but it is a handy response for these days.

Happy August from Boomers and Beyond.

Image by Lincolnian (Brian) via Flickr

Retirement village? Assisted living? Co-housing? Age-restricted or aging-in-place communities? Inter-generational cooperative? This space has explored many of the growing varieties of housing choices for boomers and elders when the time comes to downsize, rightsize, clear out or economize. Here’s a new one that’s making the news: think global.

Even with (and sometimes because of) today’s grim economy, increasing numbers of Americans are choosing senior housing overseas. Some are returning to former homes in countries with lower costs or better health care, some are finding bargain housing in inexpensive areas where they have friends or a support community.

But many are just making housing in another country life’s last great adventure.

According to Boomers Abroad, an ambitious online community/social network, the number of Americans and Canadians living abroad, already about 7 million, is expected to double and then some within the next 10 years — and you’re invited to join them. The site links to the top five locales listed in the just-released September/October issue of  AARP The Magazine the best of what Mexico, France, Panama, Portugal and Italy have to offer—”castles, palm trees, rain forests, grilled lobster—in their unique and unparalleled retirement experiences. ”

A new study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Cambridge University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduced the risk of early death.

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, combined the results from the largest studies around the world on the health impact of light and moderate intensity physical activity. It showed that the largest health benefits from light or moderate activity (such as walking and cycling) were in people who do hardly any physical activity at all. Although more activity is better — the benefits of even a small amount of physical activity are very large in the least physically active.

The good news from this study is that you don’t have to be an exercise freak to benefit from physical activity. Just achieving the recommended levels of physical activity (equivalent to 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) reduces the risk of death by 19% [95%confidence interval 15% to 24%], while 7 hours per week of moderate activity (compared with no activity) reduces the risk of death by 24% (95% CI 19% to 29%).

(Of course, if you get off the raft and jog around the lake, the benefits rise. Who knows, there could be a further reduction in the risk of death, as long as you aren’t jogging in traffic. Over on his Coloradoan blog, senior runner Jon Sinclair points out that runners of a certain age — Sinclair introduced this writer to the “pre-boomer” designation — have been at it long enough to have proved this point: “Everyone stand up. All of you that began running after 1976 can sit down. Those that still are standing can smirk proudly at those sitting. I’m sure there aren’t many of you standing. For us ‘pre-boomers,’ or pbers, the current state of running is amazing and we should all feel happy about it.”)

But the best news of all, especially for those drawn to summertime laziness, is just in from the SportsGeezer. It is the suggestion that if you invite a bunch of friends to join you on the raft, possibly planning for cocktails and dinner later, you might do just as well skipping the walk/jog altogether:

More powerful than exercise, better than giving up smoking, extensive social networks have been shown to increase longevity by 50 percent. The Scientific American reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University that reviewed the results from 148 studies—which included a total of 308,849 participants—going back to the early 20th century. Most studies assessed survival in contrast to mortality from all causes. Sciam reports that the analysis also assessed what kind of studies best predict a person’s survival. Questionnaires that had asked participants at least a few in-depth questions about various social connections (such as, “To what extent are you participating or involved in your social network?” or “To what extent can you count on other people?”) were more effective at pinpointing a person’s overall risk of mortality from all causes than those that simply determined if a person was single or married or lived with at least one other person. The researchers found that when the questions delved deeper, complex social networks increased survival rates by 91 percent.

Prospects for a pleasant summer and a long life just went up.

Image by GDS Digital via Flickr

Two things run strong and hard on both sides of my family: heart disease and type 2 diabetes. As a deluge of medical research tells us, the two are closely linked.  Often diabetes precedes heart disease, but in my family—particularly on my father’s side—it goes both ways.  My dad had his first heart attack when he was 48, but didn’t develop diabetes until about 10 years later.

The long and short of this is that I have to be careful.  My last blood glucose test revealed that I’m flirting with the pre-diabetic zone (defined as a blood glucose level between 100 and 124; 125 and up is considered diabetic).  So my doctor wisely directed me to consult with a dietician before the situation worsens.

I had my first consult a couple of months ago and received a docket of good advice touching both diet and exercise to rein in the sugar.  But the best advice was simply this: the best way to avoid diabetes is to think like a diabetic and act accordingly.

Basic as it sounds, I think this one-liner brilliant in its simplicity. People spend so much time fretting over the details of their diets, counting calories, reading the latest fad theories about what this or that nutrient does or doesn’t do.  How much better if we just start with what matters most: think differently.

I’m a little more in touch with this than some people because several of my family members have had diabetes and I know how they had to adjust their thinking and behavior to regulate their health.  But even if this isn’t true for you, it’s easy enough to find out. Once you do, it’s not necessarily essential that you perfectly copy the eating and exercise habits of a diabetic (though it may be, depending on your blood glucose situation), but at least get in the proverbial ballpark.

For me, it’s like this: cut way down on everything that is bleached, starchy and processed to the point of barely being food.  That includes white bread, white rice, most pasta, and any sort of processed potato or corn stuff. Those are the really difficult things for me (I’m Italian, after all, and we like our starchy carbs). Then there are the more obvious culprits: cookies, cake, candy.  Also hard, but I’ve found from past experience that once you’ve “de-hooked” yourself from those things for a few weeks, the cravings drop off.   Also take it easy on the juice.  I love juice (grape especially), but the problem is that the juicing process removes most of the fiber and leaves you with a whole lot of sugar.  And, goes without saying, stay away from soda, period.

What’s left?  Lean proteins, nuts, veggies, fruits (not juiced), yogurt (preferably Greek, and low-sugar), natural peanut butter, tea (unsweetened), lots of water, alcohol in moderation (2-3 drinks a week), whole wheat bread (I prefer pita), whole wheat pasta (occasionally), brown rice… You get the idea.   I know, this looks a lot like other diets, but the point here is that this isn’t really a diet. If you have diabetes, you’re not on a diet; you’re eating to maintain your health for the rest of your life.  That’s the way to think.

Throw in some modest exercise, and you’re there.  My latest favorite is swimming.  Just walking a few times a week will also do wonders.

What, so far, has thinking and acting like a diabetic done for me?  I’ve trimmed 16 pounds in less than two months.  Believe me, that was a hard fought 16 to lose, and I have many more to go, but I wouldn’t have lost an ounce without recalibrating my thinking. I have another blood glucose test coming up this month and hope to see a concomitant drop out of the red zone.

This is a topic I’m very close to. My dad died from the lethal combination of diabetes and heart disease, and I don’t plan on following suit.  If you have any questions about anything in this post, please feel free to tweet me @neuronarrative.

There are approximately 230,000 people who almost constantly shut themselves in their rooms except to go to nearby convenience stores, according to a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office. The number increases to about 700,000 if those who only go out to do something hobby-related are included.

Moreover, there are an estimated 1.55 million potential so-called ‘hikikomori’ who have felt like shutting themselves in their own rooms. Most of them are young people.

As the population of young people declines due to falling birthrates, the statistics have raised questions about the future of Japan…

Problems involving shut-ins have been pointed out over the past 15 years, but only experts and nonprofit organizations have worked on the issue, with little public support. The government has been late in responding to the situation and taken only stopgap measures. Numerous cases have ended in tragic incidents, and the situation was worsened as a result of treatment and education that lacked solid scientific foundations.

This latest survey shows that nearly 50 percent of hikikomori shut themselves away due to work problems or trouble job-hunting. Nearly three-quarters of hikikomori are men. Since this is Japan, arguably the world capital of filial shame, being identified as a shut-in can be worse than the problems that prompted the behavior in the first place. Typical comments from the survey: ”I’m sorry for my family”; “I’m worried how other people view me”; and “I sometimes feel it’s painful to live.”

To combat the growing problem, the federal government is launching a reeducation camp aimed at reintegrating hikikomori back into society. Which sounds creepy, but what else are they going to do? On this side of the globe, we’d send camera crews to document the downward spirals for an A&E series.

Crossposted at Caveat Viator

My analysis, however, along with the entire business model around which specialty running shoe stores are based, might be fundamentally flawed.

In fact, according to a report on the NYTimes.com Well blog, running shoe advice given by everyone within the industry – from medical professionals like podiatrists and physical therapists to coaches and marketers – is almost entirely based on unscientific findings.

When scientific method is applied to examine whether running shoes serve their essential purpose – to prevent injury – studies consistently show no difference between “proper” and “improper” shoes.

Over the course of three large studies, the most recent of which was published last month in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers found almost no correlation at all between wearing the proper running shoes and avoiding injury. Injury rates were high among all the runners, but they were highest among the soldiers who had received shoes designed specifically for their foot types. If anything, wearing the “right” shoes for their particular foot shape had increased trainees’ chances of being hurt.

Among the concepts the studies debunk are whether pronation is an inherent injury risk. Pronation, the inward rolling motion of feet and lower legs upon striking the surface (caused by collapsing arches) is a distinguishing factor for determining what the “right” shoe is for runners.

The majority of runners pronate to some extent, which is why moderate stability shoes like Asics 2150 and Brooks Adrenaline, are the most oft-purchased shoes in any specialty running shoe.

But there’s a biological reason humans naturally pronate. To sustain the high impact that running has on the body, pronation naturally dissipates shock over a larger surface area of your foot, rather than being concentrated in one part.

Although it looks physically traumatic to the body, when viewed in slow motion, there aren’t much conclusive findings to connect pronation to an increased injury risk. Meaning, the in-store gait analysis process that specialty running promote so heavily would be based on little more than a marketing ploy.

There are a couple caveats to consider before you throw out your $100 running shoes and convert to barefoot running, however.

First of all, the NYTimes.com article doesn’t specify what kinds of shoes the subjects used in the studies. Are they all high-end shoes, in which the only variable is functional category (neutral vs. stability vs. motion control)? There’s a big difference between high-end shoes, which cost between $85 – $140, and low-end pairs, which usually cost less than $50 and fall apart within a month of heavy use. It’s likely that a noticeable difference would emerge if the sample size compared shoes by price rather than functionality. In which case there would still be merit to purchasing high-end running shoes, albeit less merit in the gait analysis process.

Secondly, any running store staffer who tells you that shoes will exclusively prevent an injury is either ignorant or lying. It would be an easy sale, telling customers what they want to hear,  that their injury is as quick a fix as buying new running shoes.

Unfortunately, like training itself, injury prevention requires a holistic approach. Stretching and strengthening exercises, which build up flexibility and support in the muscles, ligaments and tendons that running stresses the  most, are essential. So are regular massages, if you can afford them. If you can’t, pick up a cheap substitute, like a foam roller, a rolling stick or one of Trigger Points special density rollers.

Above all, don’t go into the shoe-buying process without your own information and perspective. Try on shoes in all of the functional categories, not just the ones your sales associate recommends. Try to feel the difference between the shoes and ask your associate what their purposes are. And remember that the best fitting shoe in the store will likely be the best fit for your training, regardless of whether it is the one subscribed to you.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Not too sure about her consort, pictured here, from the forehead up. The headware was part of his laughable bid for Governorship of California. How laughable? Read on.

Los Angeles, California (CNN) — How well Zsa Zsa Gabor is recovering from hip replacement surgery a week ago depends on whom you ask: her husband or her daughter. Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said his wife of 24 years is in “critical” condition, but daughter Francesca Hilton said her condition is “guarded.” Gabor, 93, suffered a broken hip in a fall at her Bel Air, California, home nine days ago. “It’s up and down,” Von Anhalt said Monday afternoon. “It worries me very much.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor is from good, hearty Hungarian stock. She may well survive this trial and then the so-called Prince will have to wait a bit longer to inherit all those wedding rings from past marriages. After all, she herself said “I never hated a husband enough to give him his diamonds back.”

The so-called prince’s royal credentials certainly bear closer scrutiny. According to Wikipedia, he became the adopted son of Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt at the age of 37 in a business transaction put together by Hans Hermann Weyer, a former consul of Bolivia.

Not that I’m knocking this, not entirely. I mean, I’d simply adore to have a title, even if did come out of a packet of breakfast cereal. What is also… interesting is that since marrying, the couple have adopted several grown men:  Marcus Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Marcus Eberhardt), who now calls himself as “Prince Germany”; Oliver Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Oliver Bendig); and Michael Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Michael Killer.) Following their adoption, all these chaps are entitled to use the last name of “Prinz von Anhalt”. In return for what, we can only surmise. In any case, back to the ailing screen siren of yore…

“The publicist for Hilton, however, gave a more optimistic report. Edward Lozzi said the glamour icon was able to sit up in bed and talk, an improvement that followed a blood transfusion and the removal of her morphine drip over the weekend.”

Again, this is a Hungarian woman we’re talking about. You could probably shoot her full of enough morphine to keep Pete Doherty and the Libertines out of recording studios for the next decade, and she’d still be babbling away.

Gabor has “rallied” and is “more talkative,” Lozzi said.

More talkative than whom?

She is still in the intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, but the prince’s publicist, John Blanchette, said she could go home as soon as Thursday.

I see, so the prince’s publicist differs from the great lady’s publicist? My what a strange little band of 21st century Californian courtiers they must be when all assembled.

Von Anhalt is either Gabor’s eighth or ninth husband; depending on whether you count one marriage that was quickly annulled. The glamorous Hungarian-born actress, the second of the three celebrated Gabor sisters, is most famous for her many marriages. Among her other husbands was Oscar-winning actor George Sanders.

via Prince: Zsa Zsa Gabor’s recovery is ‘up and down’ – CNN.com.

Her older sister Magda got married to Sanders some time after he was divorced from Zsa Zsa, which would seem to indicate that he had a thing for chatty and batty Hungarian beauties. And who can blame him? Certainly not this Budapest resident. George Sanders must have felt that, after two Gabor sisters, life held little more in store for him by way of excitement, for he committed suicide, leaving behind the most urbane suicide note imaginable. It read: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

How simply wonderful. The prince I feel, is somewhat less so. You may remember he was one of the men who came forward to claim possible paternity of poor Anna Nicole Smith’s baby girl in 2006. If that wasn’t fantastical enough, less than a year later, he had a great story for the police. Found naked inside his Rolls-Royce, he claimed to have been taken in by three nubile, young beauties who at first asked him to pose for pictures with them. At this point, von Anhalt said they stripped him bare, took his car keys, wallet and money, jewellery, driver’s license and clothes, before handcuffing him to the steering wheel. Which was remarkable, given that he was able to call the cops to the scene of the crime, using his cellular phone. The culprits, he said, had driven away in a Chrysler convertible.  How common, you’d think they’d have at least had the good taste to dig up a Bentley from somewhere.

You may also recall that Zsa Zsa has had some trouble with the Old Bill herself. In 1989, while still a spritely 72 year old, she was jailed for as many hours after slapping a Beverly Hills cop who had the temerity to slap her with a traffic fine.

Be that as it may, we wish her Royal ZsaZsaness a speedy recovery. Her eventual passing will and probably should be mourned in Hungary, not only as a famous daughter of Hungarian soil, but as the last of her kind. She was born in Budapest. In 1917.

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an idea — bigger women rock. From the Daily Mail:

All women should aspire to be a size 14 with buxom, hourglass figures, the new equalities minister claims.

They must not be made to feel inadequate by stick-thin models staring out of advertising billboards and magazines.

Instead, they should regard curvaceous women such as Christina Hendricks, star of the TV series Mad Men, as their ultimate role models, Lynne Featherstone said.

The Liberal Democrat minister described the actress, who plays Joan Holloway in the popular American drama set in the 1960s, as ‘absolutely fabulous’.

She said that too often, women were made to feel wretched about their size as they were constantly comparing themselves with ‘unattainable’ figures of celebrities and models…

‘Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous. We need more of these role models,’ she added.

I agree. I’m sick to death of skinny 16 year olds held up as my “role model” when I am neither their age nor aspire to their body size or proportions.

I weary of the Olsen twins, billionaires who look like homeless people wearing too much eyeshadow. Or actresses whose shoulder blades protruding from their designer ballgowns on the red carpet simply look scary.

I recently saw an older woman at a local restaurant whose legs resembled twigs. She looked terribly unhealthy but had clearly starved herself to this size.

Or…is this just one more excuse to be a little piggy and eat too much?

Frieden, who also serves as Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, is in a position to understand all this. A physician with training in internal medicine, infectious diseases, public health and epidemiology, he has spent the past several decades combating disease and advocating for preventive measures across the U.S. and around the world. He took over as head of CDC in June, 2009.

Speaking to an audience of health professionals and community members at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club recently, Frieden launched his remarks with a story of treating one patient, a few years ago, who had multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB is on the rise these days.) Cost of treatment? Over $100,000. Cost of prevention, had this one man been vaccinated? $10.

High on the list of largely preventable diseases, Frieden said, is cardiovascular disease. Simple measures like quitting smoking, cutting down on (or eliminating) trans fats and losing weight would lead to huge reductions in expenditures on treatment of cardiovascular disease, not to mention longer, healthier lives. He also cited the $200 billion cost of tobacco-related disease, which currently claims some 1200 lives per day.

Other preventable health care costs come from teen pregnancy and motor vehicle accidents, Frieden said, citing the dollars that are saved when these don’t happen. But he came down hardest on obesity. “It is epidemic in the U.S.,” he said. “And in the next 30 years obesity is expected to double in adults and triple among children.”

One audience question (OK, it was submitted by this writer/agitator) went unanswered in the Q&A session following the talk: How can the exorbitant costs invested in often-futile end-of-life treatment be reduced? But that question may have been buried in the substantial pile of other questions posed in relation to the above, and other issues such as:

Can CDC spread some money around to states and local governments for health care? “In a word, no.” And what about the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Its effects will be with us for a long time, Frieden said, but CDC’s primary concern right now is with health and safety of workers and others on the scene. CDC is involved with a number of other agencies addressing the human and environmental impacts of the disaster.

The event was introduced by California HealthCare Foundation Director of the Chronic Disease Care Program Sophia Chang, and moderated by University of California San Francisco Chancellor Emeritus and Global Health Institute Director Haile Debas.

On the good news side — which was a slim side of the room, no pun intended — Frieden cited progress in efforts to promote biking and walking as an alternative to the automobile (currently costing $4 million in emergency room visits and $200 billion overall annual costs; “$12 billion could be saved by seat belts”) and in HIV prevention (treatment for one person: $400,000; cost of a condom, five cents.)

This reporter stood briefly at the back of the near-capacity crowd before the talk started and counted 24 audience members who would qualify as obese. It’s easy to feel righteous when you’ve never had a major weight problem and you got to the event on foot and on Muni bus. It’s hard to feel unsympathetic when you can’t seem to lose those 3 or 4 pounds you could really do without, when you smell the french fries while passing every fast food joint on Market Street and you know how many people don’t have access to good public transportation.

Public health is, indeed a public problem. Dr. Frieden has his work cut out for him.

Memory eraser? Image via Wikipedia

Why is this not on every front page in America? Instead it’s oil spills and the economy. But this item actually affects lives:

Diana Kerwin of Northwestern University and colleagues studied 8,745 normal post-menopausal women ages 65 to 79 who participated in the Women’s Health Initiative, a massive federal study examining a host of health issues.

For every one-point increase in a woman’s body mass index (BMI), her score on a 100-point memory test dropped by one point, the researchers reported last week in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

via the The Check Up: Washington Post

Unfortunately, most of the reports covering this story missed the real news. Just read NaturalNews.com’s conclusion: “Either way, experts recommend that overweight people strive to lose weight as part of a healthy overall lifestyle.” Yeah fine fine, but think about what’s really been proven in this study: Gorging on ice cream does indeed help you forget heartbreak.

Now, this won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy, but here’s the formula. Let’s say you score 80 on your memory test, which means you remember that time your ex promised to always be honest about his/her feelings, so that if any real problems in the relationship started to arise for him/her, it would not come as a surprise. In fact you can’t stop remembering that, right?

Okay, let’s say you’re 5 feet 5 inches and weigh 145 pounds. Your BMI is 24.1, according to the NIH, unless you are a man and then it’s another number. Your memory is going to need a lot of degrading, at least a 10-point drop. So get serious. Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream is 540 calories per cup. If you sit still all day, eat three regular meals that cover the base 1,380 calorie intake needed, you could get to a 34.1 BMI index in a month by eating about 16 cups of chocolate ice cream per day. (I am not a medical professional, please consult a doctor to verify these numbers.)

If you are a post-menopausal woman, that is.

I am not, which might explain why this study does not apply to me. As I have mentioned before, I spent the past year losing weight. I am now 72 pounds lighter than I used to be, which means I’ve dropped 11 points on the BMI. That has not stopped me from getting three parking tickets in a MONTH because I keep forgetting to re-park the car after the street sweeper goes by.

But I’m being the typical killjoy blogger now. And you’re probably feeling like this did not help your heartbreak at all, but you’re wrong there. I bet it never occurred to anyone before to eat ice cream after a bad breakup and that’s got to be good for something.

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Image by halfmortimer via Flickr

A Salt Lake City mom is pregnant with two babies, only they’re not twins. They don’t even have the same due date. The expectant mom, Angie Cromar has two uteruses, a rare condition known as uterus didelphys. She got pregnant with one and then a couple of weeks later with another.

It’s happy news for the 34-year-old and baffling news for her doctors. The chance of her getting pregnant in both uteruses was one in five million. Only 100 such cases of a double pregnancy like Cromar’s are known.

Cromar and her husband already have three children under 8 years old so she was aware of her rare condition. She also knows that this pregnancy isn’t without its risks. The babies could be born at a low birth weight or prematurely. But so far, so good. The fetuses are around 20-weeks along (give or take a week, right?) and they are developing normally.

The Cromars found out about this extremely unusual pregnancy when she went in for an ultrasound. The techs saw one fetus that was five weeks and one day along and then noticed the second, which was more like six weeks and a day.

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• A Woman with Two Uteruses Is Pregnant in Both of Them [Pregnancies] (gawker.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been so good — eating much less and much healthier than ever before.

But yesterday I fell so far off the wagon it was lost in the the distance.

Because I had to say goodbye to my Mom, who I see, at most, once a year and sometimes only every two years; we live very far apart and the costs of hotel (small apartments for us both with too-big personalities) make it a challenge to do it frequently. She lives in Canada, and I in the U.S., having traded our native countries.

I hate that goodbye, not knowing when, or if, I’ll see her again. She’s 76, in OK health, living alone. I’m her only child.

She beat me bloody at gin rummy and I trounced her at Scrabble. That’s a good visit for us.

So it was a plate of Belgian waffles, (whipped cream and strawberries), that morning on the ferry ride back to Vancouver. It was a beer at lunch, and some of the fries that came with my fish and chips. It was a package of wine gums (a chewy candy I can’t find in New York.)

Yes, dammit, all in one day.

Comfort food. It didn’t heal my sadness, but at least I’m now quite conscious when I make lousy choices and why.

Today I took a long bike ride around Stanley Park, admiring herons and seaplanes. Healthier, more fun, fewer calories.

The first wagon-abandonment — and the first time I was really aware of this comfort connection — was the day True/Slant was suddenly sold to Forbes, putting my future with them (still) in doubt. I had a small scoop of ice cream and it tasted very good. Wrong choice, yes, but the day a carrot really makes me feel better I’ve turned into a rabbit.

What’s your comfort food? What pushes you to (over) indulge in it?

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As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.

Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”

Much of the current finger-pointing is toward pathologists, where their money comes from, whether they are ‘certified’ or not and in general, how good a job they do.

In 2006, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an influential breast cancer survivors’ organization, released a startling study. It estimated that in 90,000 cases, women who receive a diagnosis of D.C.I.S. or invasive breast cancer either did not have the disease or their pathologist made another error that resulted in incorrect treatment.

After the Komen report, the College of American Pathologists announced several steps to improve breast cancer diagnosis, including the certification program for pathologists.

For the medical community, the Komen findings were not surprising, since the risk of misdiagnosis had been widely written about in medical literature. One study in 2002, by doctors at Northwestern University Medical Center, reviewed the pathology in 340 breast cancer cases and found that 7.8 percent of them had errors serious enough to change plans for surgery.

This space has argued occasionally for reconsideration of yearly mammograms and for longer, stronger consideration of other options before a mastectomy is performed. Especially in the case of older women.

Would I insist on further studies or opt for less radical treatment if I were diagnosed with breast cancer today? Probably. Can I undo the mastectomy I had at 72? Not exactly. Second-guessing is beside the point for someone who is healthy and fit, but asking questions won’t ever hurt.

Earliest Steps to Find Breast Cancer Are Prone to Error – NYTimes.com.

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It seems to be that time. Time for re-thinking, re-evaluating, re-fashioning. Our lives.

Liz turned 25 yesterday. My time came back in March. Like a mutual friend said, “We’ve now entered a new demographic bracket.” 25 is half-way to 50. We’re closer to the way we’ll be at 30 than the way we were in high school.

I took a long, healing Saturday walk with another recently turned 25:er this weekend. She was unhappy at her job, was feeling unappreciated, unhealthy, and overworked. The words she hardly dared utter, an ugly cliché she didn’t want to identify with, slipped out like a whisper: “burned out.” She’d woken up to the truth of it when she tried to log 25 hours worked in a row and the computer wouldn’t allow her to enter a number higher than 24, the total number of hours in a day. Another bracket had been broken, and she had slipped through.

Now she wanted— needed— a change. She wrote me yesterday that she had decided to leave her job and look for something new, something that would allow her a healthier, saner lifestyle: “Basically the next job I take, whatever it may be, I want to be something where I can prioritize my life first, and then also do my job well.” For this friend, the New York way had gotten the best of her; the endless push to both work and play harder and harder until she no longer had the energy to do either. Reaching 25 for her meant waking up to realize the dream she had been chasing—the bling and the title and the prestige— wasn’t really, truly, what she wanted. She didn’t know exactly what it was she wanted, but she was relieved to know what it was she didn’t want.

Call it the quarter-life crisis, or call it classic Gen Y brattiness, but all around me, other twenty-five year olds are looking at where they are and what they are doing and feeling strangely….out of place. Perhaps it’s the job that wasn’t as satisfying as they thought it would be, the boss who mistreats them, their neglected physiques, the flights they secretly search for but never buy on Kayak.com. For some, it’s the dream they keep having but don’t dare follow.

Over drinks, a friend of mine who works in financial services told me how miserable he is at the job that pays him incredibly well. “What would you do if you could just stop having to live up to this macho idea of the money-making man?” I asked—knowing him well enough to know why he was in his unhappy position in the first place. His answer was immediate: “public planning.” He had been a Geography major in college, a GIS wiz. I had forgotten that. The fact that he wouldn’t do what he wanted because he felt he needed to do what was expected of him was depressing to me. I recalled my friend who’d “burned out,” who’d said she didn’t know what she really wanted. That seemed a million times better than knowing exactly what it is you want and still not doing it.

Another friend told me that up until we’re 25, we think we know it all. After 25, we realize we really know nothing. All the plans we had in college and directly thereafter have given way to a messy reality, where life often gets in the way of our meticulous calculations. You lost your job, you got an unexpected job, you were in an accident, or you fell in love with a boy and that love made you move across the world. At 25, we are beginning to understand, truly, that plans, like rules, are meant to be broken. It is often the spontaneous, the unforeseen, that chisels out our individuality.

Now, at 25, when we’ve started to stir from the frenzied state of our early twenties, when we’ve begun to look at where we’ve come and either feel dissatisfied or just plain antsy, perhaps it is time to stop planning and start doing. To stop fearing side-steps and mis-steps. To, as a wise man I spoke to recently said, breach the minefield and step on the mine, because maybe, just maybe, stepping on the mine is part of it.

That same wise man left me with these words: “You have to live the life you claim you want to have. No one will prevent you.” At 25, it is time to take his advice.

- Astri

David Graham, president of Telecommunications On Demand, the company near Orlando where [Internet content reviewer Ricky Bess] works, compared the reviewers to “combat veterans, completely desensitized to all kinds of imagery.” The company’s roughly 50 workers view a combined average of 20 million photos a week.

– “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts,” The New York Times: July 19, 2010

20 million images divided by 50 workers = 400,000 images screened per worker per 5-day week, or
80,000 images screened per worker per eight-hour day, or
10,000 images screened per per hour, or
167 images screened per worker per minute, or
2.78 images screened per worker per second.

Dear Mr. Graham: Do you really want to keep your reviewers from walking around the office like Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter”? Hire more reviewers.

(Due diligence: These insane calculations only hold up if you believe the numbers Graham fed the Times, which I don’t. Doesn’t anybody over there have a calculator?)

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The folks at Energy Fiend have developed an online calculator called “Death by Caffeine” that tells you roughly how many Red Bulls, Monsters, Rock Stars, etc you’d have to drink to keel over.  The number of drinks you can choose from on the killer-drink drop down menu is staggering, but upon closer inspection it looks like they include regular sodas like Pepsi, Coke and the like along with the amped up drinks (and even energy mints and coffee ice cream).

I’m going to enter my information, choosing Red Bull as my initial poison. Here’s the result:

It would take 204.75 cans of Red Bull to put you down.

Comparatively:

Gulp down 474.78 cans of Coca-Cola Classic and you’re history.

You could drink 297.82 cans of Mountain Dew before croaking.

It would take 109.20 cups of Starbucks Tall Caffe Americano to put you down.

If you eat 341.25 Cups of Haagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream, you’ll be pushing up daisies.

By the way (and I say this as a die-hard coffee drinker), imbibing caffeine to stay awake is one of the silliest things we humans do.  The reason is this: in the brain, caffeine acts as an antagonist (a blocker) of adenosine–the neurotransmitter that pushes us closer and closer to sleep until we nod off–and it’s very good at accomplishing this. The problem is that with less exposure to adenosine, we become even more sensitive to the neurotransmitter’s effects. If we reduce our intake of caffeine, or simply become more tolerant of it, we actually find ourselves becoming more tired. So then we jack up the caffeine to counteract the withdrawal, but that just increases our tolerance.

Takeaway: you can only fool your brain into not sleeping for so long before succumbing to the inevitable crash.

HT: MindHacks

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Hatred is corrosive, it almost always hurts the hater. While you don’t always see it, sometimes the foundation of someone’s character can get so worn away that the person’s facade cracks and falls: like Mel Gibson. The story of his well-documented flame-out into a hate-filled, abusive former movie-star would benefit from understanding more about how hatred can destroy a hater.

His abusive behavior didn’t start with current money troubles and stresses. Nor is it simply a narcissist running amok. It comes from hate.  Hate that was amply foreshadowed by the virulent anti-Semitism about which we all worked so hard not to know we knew. Four years ago at the time of Gibson’s anti-Semetic rant during a DUI arrest, Christopher Hitchens didn’t work not to know the obvious, he shoved it in our face:

And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or “deicide.” It is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism.

via Is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite? – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine.

Empty core? That is hopefully just Hitchens’ rhetorical excess; if Gibson’s core was empty we’d have little useful to learn from him. He’s a person not a monster, even though he acts monstrously. Gibson has inside of him the same all-too human unconscious processes through which we all live our lives.

In trying to learn something from Gibson’s behavior I am not some sort of pollyanna closing his eyes or trying to make lemonade from an oil slick. I slow down to rubberneck at car-crashes as much as anyone, and if I see something I end up feeling the same fascinated horror I felt reading about Gibson’s catastrophic crash. And the truth is that there is no bigger celebrity crash out there than Gibson (sorry LeBron and Lindsay, but Mel journeyed alone into the realm of the unredeemable: all you need LeBron is a championship—or two—to be a hero again and Lindsay, well, you’ll be America’s sweetheart as soon as you get sober and make a good movie—or two).

So, what can we learn about ourselves from Gibson’s hatred more interesting than the soporific tautology, “people are people.” Can we learn anything useful?

Ken Eisold, a friend and colleague, has written a terrific new book What You Don’t Know Your Know. He pulls together a story about a “new unconscious” from research done in a variety of different fields. What he says about prejudice is helpful. He writes that “prejudice is a universal process rooted in normal development” that come from “how our brains create categories as part of our adaption to reality.” Furthermore, these prejudices and stereotypes can become malignant when we start to protect our identity by putting all the crap into other groups. They—whoever “they” may be—are the ones who are lazy, cheap, avaricious, or devious; we’re not, we’re fine!

But prejudice gets worse, much worse; ordinary bigotry is still pretty far from Gibson’s behavior. Our unconscious process of creating categories and attaching identity-protective values to those categories can degrade further to the level of rape and abuse, genocide, and ethnic cleansing when we dehumanize other people. That’s how a neighbor becomes vermin to be extinguished, a President becomes an anti-American Muslim/socialist/noncitizen, or a woman gets attacked for being nothing more than a “bitch” or a “cunt” (to use two of the more unsavory terms from Gibson’s latest taped rage).

Unconscious dehumanization drives much that we call evil and understanding how it operates in each of our lives is the lesson from ”The Hatred of the Gibson.”

Staring with his hatred of Jews and ending with recordings of verbal abuse and allegations of much worse, we can see that when you nurture processes of dehumanization instead of fighting them you end up dehumanizing yourself. Out of control dehumanization is like a cancer that needs to be caught early and aggressively fought. Luckily, traffic with the new unconscious moves in both directions. So, when what you don’t know you know sends up a flare—be it in a dream, a confusing feeling, an out of character behavior, or a train of thought arriving at a perplexing station—pay attention. You’re trying to tell yourself something important you don’t know you know.

And if you think you’re immune to dehumanization, that it is something you would never ever do, that it is something “they”—the evil others—do but not you, think again. It is something that happens inside our unconscious all the time. We couldn’t get through a day without it, full human awareness would just be too painful. We adaptively dehumanize others when we blind ourselves to the homeless guy sleeping by the train station, to events in Darfur, or even to the suffering of future generations because of our addiction to burning fossil fuels. In fact, we even entertain ourselves with it by putting the LeBrons and Lindsays of the world up on celebrity pedestals.

Like rubberneckers at the highway crash relieved that what could have happened to them happened to someone else, our fascination with Gibson’s hatred includes some relief that he was the one that crashed, not us. What we don’t know we know is that any of us could have been Mel, it’s all a matter of degree. He’s not “other,” he’s us.

Rather than burden their children with the daunting task of caring for them as they age, some baby boomers may be considering an extreme form of “relief.” Suicide.

Psychiatrist Mark Goulston says he’s been approached by some middle-aged patients who say they’d rather “take a bottle of pills” than inconvenience their children.

Dr. Goulston blames the problem on the impatient nature of “millennials” – the offspring of baby boomers – a trait he says was passed down from the boomers themselves.

Adding to their angst is their own experience of taking care of elderly parents, which sometimes leads to feelings of resentment. Baby boomers don’t want their own children to grow to resent and begrudge them when they get old and feeble.

There’s a video exchange between Goulston and CNN’s Don Lemon that’s worth watching, but won’t lift your spirits much.

Add to this don’t-be-a-burden dilemma — and it IS a dilemma that crosses the mind of everyone over 60 and most folks who have a parent over 60 — the bizarre situation of estate taxes right now and the whole business of dying gets seriously complicated. It was okay last year, when you knew estate taxes were magically going to disappear on January 1, 2010, so the focus was on staying alive until then.

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Recovering alcoholics are generally counseled to stay away from “people, places and things”—anything, that is, that might be a cue for drinking. Bars are an especially potent trigger for the cravings that can lead to relapse.

Yet sober alcoholics vary greatly in their susceptibility to such social cues. Many appear to have no problem hanging around taverns and parties sipping club soda, and some even work as bartenders. But others—even alcoholics with years of sobriety—get a yearning every time they see even a stranger hoist a glass.

Why do some find these cues so vexing, while others appear free of temptation? Some new research points to genetics—but with a surprising twist. While it’s long been suspected that heredity plays some role in alcoholism, the new work suggests that there may be a specific genetic predisposition for being tempted by others’ drinking. If this finding holds up, it could have important implications for the prevention and treatment of alcohol addiction.

The work comes from the lab of behavioral geneticist Helle Larsen at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Larsen and her colleagues actually created a fake bar for their study, complete with actors playing teetotalers, light drinkers, and indulgent drinkers. They brought more than a hundred men and women into the bar, one by one, under the pretense that they were taking a half-hour break from a completely unrelated study. These men and women would—seemingly by chance—end up chatting at the bar with one of the actors, who would either drink soda, nurse one beer or glass of wine, or toss back three or four drinks in rapid succession.

There were no teetotalers among the subjects. They typically drank about 14 drinks a week. The idea in this study was to see whether their drinking on this particular occasion was influenced by the drinking they observed in the fake bar—and more to the point, whether their actions were associated with their genetic make-up. The scientists had taken saliva samples earlier, and examined each subject’s DNA for a genetic variation already considered suspect in heavy drinking.

The results were clear and provocative. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those with the suspect gene did indeed ape the drinking habits of the person on the next bar stool, but only if that person was drinking a lot. Under that condition, the genetic “carriers” drank twice as much as those lacking the genetic variation. In other words, the bar itself didn’t trigger heavy drinking, nor did the tinkling of glasses or even normal social drinking. The only thing that made those with the unfortunate genes drink too much was seeing someone else boozing.

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It’s been a fun year so far for me: X-rays, MRIs, steroids, a cane, even a walker. My left hip is a mess, and a surgeon wants me to replace it, now.

While I have been resisting, the bone has gotten damaged, so next month (right after vacation) I’ll start a drug to repair it, putting me on crutches for three months. No more softball this season.

There have been many days I feel overwhelmed by it all. I need backup.

The sweetie has — as anyone living with, and caring for, someone with chronic illness or injury knows — put up with a lot. I walk like a drunken sailor and awaken many nights at 3:00 a.m. with pain. So he decided to take my health into his hands and, while I’m a continent away on vacation visiting family and friends, called my doc, a man often ferocious and intimidating.

But my guy is, too when necessary; we have a meeting for all three of us in two weeks.

The sweetie wondered if he’d overstepped his bounds. I was surprised the doctor spoke to him, but I am relieved and grateful as hell that I now have backup, someone else in the room while the multi-syllabic words pour forth.

When you’re sick or injured and in pain and scared, it’s damn hard to hear clearly and remember everything. I got the news about the latest hip  issue while standing alone in the baggage claim area of Vancouver airport. I was shocked, overwhelmed, tried not to cry in public. (When I learned that my Mom [now fine] needed neurosurgery for a brain tumor, I was standing in an Ohio field with 3,000 shooters behind me in competition. Bad news shows up everywhere.)

This week, it was my turn — as my Mom’s only child, albeit living on the opposite side of North America and in another country — to advocate for her. We went to see her internist so I could find out what she’s doing for my Mom (or not.)

My Mom lives in Canada, and it’s a different game; doctors are busy and some tests and procedures harder to get or get quickly. You can’t push Canadian doctors as hard as Americans because there’s no profit motive driving them to behave better, or avoid a lawsuit.

It was an interesting meeting — it could not have lasted more than 15 minutes. It was tough to cover that much territory so quickly. It went as well as one could hope, but there’s much left to do and to follow up.

Have you acted as someone’s medical advocate? Or had one?

Did it help?

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