I am so happy. I’ve been writing for the Prostate Cancer Foundation for several months now; everything I’m writing is for men with prostate cancer and their families. It’s right up my alley – telling men what they need to know, what their doctors might not tell them or may not even know, and most […]
This is the second part of a series on aging well. – Janet It all makes sense, but sometimes we need to hear this stuff anyway. Eat right, get vaccinated, and get some sun, because Vitamin D protects your body and helps prevent cancer. This is from How to Age Well, Part 1. Part […]
Quality of life is the key: our goal shouldn’t be just to live to a ripe old age. No one wants to be old and decrepit (or decrepit at any age, frankly). But old and healthy – now that’s an exciting goal. Jeremy Walston, M.D., a gerontologist at Johns Hopkins, co-directs the Biology of Frailty […]
The day of discharge from the hospital – any hospital — is like being at a bad party or uncomfortable family reunion. It’s interminable. Everybody’s ready for it to be over, including you; you just want to go home. Shortly before it’s time to go, a nurse goes over your discharge instructions. Maybe you nod […]
Medicine wears off. If you take a pill, its benefit might last for 12 or even 24 hours, and then you have to take another one. The same holds true for acupuncture. Although administered differently – inserting very thin needles through your skin at strategic points – its effects tend to fade just as […]
Do you feel connected, or tethered? While you’re mulling that over, here’s another one: Can you handle downtime? The art of loafing — made famous by such characters as Huckleberry Finn; the morbidly obese passengers of the spaceship, Axiom, in the Pixar movie WALL-E; and cats everywhere – has its good points. There’s something to […]
This post, as many Vital Jake posts do, came because of a conversation I happened to have with a guy at church. He said he felt bad, and that he had been waking up with itchy eyes and a headache. I asked him how often he changed his sheets, and he was stumped. He didn’t […]