Senior Health Issues

It’s about time to see how we seniors feel about President Obama’s proposed health care plan. What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of this plan? How important to you is the public option?

Stop by and post a word or two and let us know how you evaluate these potential changes.

If you want to brush up on the plan or read a Chicago Trib report on the issue, just go here.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should immediately ban the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia because it can cause death from liver failure and has many other life-threatening risks that far outweigh its benefits, Public Citizen said in a petition filed October 30, 2008, with the agency.

The above and other news about medications can be found at the Public Citizen’s site Worst Pills. A subscription site (annual $15) for all but residents of developing countries, Worst Pills also sells a companion book, Worst Pills, Best Pills.

I have found it a useful site now and then and recommend you take a look at it if you deal with meds on a regular basis. Note: I am neither a physician nor pharmacist, so its reliability must be judged by each of us individually.

For non-subscribers, the site offers some free drug information as well as access to recent postings of drug news.

An interesting article in today’s Los Angeles Times concerns the growing trend among physicians to design individualized treatment for such illnesses as various cancers.

Personalized medical care is a practical benefit from the Human Genome Project, the 13-year project, completed in 2003, that gave scientists a precision map of the genetic information of humans. Completion of the genome project allowed them to easily locate genetic differences between individuals, including gene variations that cause disease, as well as molecular changes that sometimes turn cells rogue.

“This revolution in molecular biology has translated to understanding . . . the reasons why cancer grows,” says Dr. Roy S. Herbst, chief of the section of thoracic medical oncology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

According to this article, “Personalized medicine aims to minimize that one-size-fits-all approach by matching each patient to a specific treatment based on the genetic and molecular characteristics of that person’s tumor. Doctors can use genetic information gleaned from the tumor itself to choose — or avoid — certain medications for that patient. . . .”

Take a look at the article so you can be prepared to ask your physician to consider treatment beyond the formulaic should the need arise.

How many meds are you taking every day? Do you always verify that your medications work well together and pose no health threat?

There are several sites online that offer to check drug interactions for you, and it is always good to have one or two of these sites bookmarked so you can check how well your drugs work together.

Check out the Medscape drug interaction site, for example.

And there is the Drug Interaction Checker.

And there is valuable drug information at the FDA site here.

You may want to run these sites past your physician for additional suggestions and evaluation.

“The longer action on reforming health care and Social Security is delayed, the more painful and difficult the choices will become,” said a Government Accountability Office study in June. “The federal government faces increasing pressures, yet a shrinking window of opportunity for phasing in adjustments.”

The above from a Miami Herald Report on the presidential candidates and the all too immediate problems of national health care and Social Security is part of an interesting take by at least one viewer of the second presidential debate.

According to this report, Medicare has about a decade of solvency, and Social Security is likely to collapse around 2041.

Take a look and the story and share your predictions on how we can best solve these two huge problems.

Do you like quizzes? Try this Aging IQ quiz from the National Institute on Aging.

Share your score with us.

I got a 22 out of 30 and learned a few things.

What do you think?

How many chair backs and cabinets have you grabbed this week when a sudden turn or just some perverse natural law made you feel as though you were losing your balance?

The following videos may be helpful for teaching you at least one way to improve your balance. I tried several, and they have helped me.

Did you know that there may now be a way to predict which of us golden oldies may be prone to strokes and which may not? A recent news release from Reuters and reprinted on the MSNBC site discusses a team of Italian scientists who conducted such a study.

The team selected seniors who were apparently healthy but had at least three “abnormalities” such as hand tremors, posture problems, or hand-length differences.

“A simple neurological examination seems to be an additional prognosticator of hard outcomes, particularly death above and beyond other measures used in clinical practice,” Marco Inzitari of the University of Florence and colleagues wrote Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

To read the entire report, just follow the link posted above.

I’ve never had surgery of any sort unless one can call lithotripsy surgery.

An advance in surgery promises to extract the offending organ via some existing orifice so that the patient does not have to suffer with a scar. Hmmmm, the website of the University of California at San Diego includes a page with links to a number of news stories on this procedure, including several stories on someone who had an appendix removed through the mouth.

Scars are beginning to look pretty good to me. And guess which orifice is host to an exiting gall bladder in the case of women patients.

You might want to know about this new approach to surgery.

If only to be fond of your scars after surgery.

Jean Celine, 64, was already so worried about rising health-care costs that she’d been forcing herself to go to the gym every day to stay healthy. After last week, her nerves are shot. Like many her age, she has only a small pot of money to live on for the rest of her life. Any loss is a big loss. And the average 65-year-old retiree can expect to live 17 more years, the AARP says. So this weekend, Celine started a $15-an-hour job. “I’ll probably be working for the rest of my life,” she said. “Some golden years.”

After last week, psychologists took to the airwaves to tell people not to become sick over losing money, advising that pausing was better than panicking. But by then, enough people had sufficiently panicked to make a run on the $3.5 trillion in money market funds, similar to the bank runs that led to the Great Depression.

In today’s Washington Post, Brigid Schulte alludes to the stress and threats to physical health brought on by the recent financial crisis on Wall Street.

We all know the standard suggestions for handling stress: get lots of physical activity, eat and sleep well, surround yourself with friends, and so on.

What suggestions have you for dealing with the particular stress that money worries bring? Clearly this sort of stress can be very real among seniors as skyrocketing gasoline costs, soaring food prices, and clearly taxes that will rise to pay for the bailouts converge to deal blows to fixed incomes.

Does anyone have realistic suggestions for managing financial stress?