Don’t Become the Talk of Your Office Holiday Party!

Here are some rules of the road for that most joyous of holiday happenings: The Office Holiday Party.

Finding a Star Doctor

Over the years, I’ve had several people tell me that I remind them of someone from a soap opera. On more than three occasions in the last year, a patient or their caregiver told me I was the spitting image of the comedian Jim Carey.

Want to Live Longer? Embrace Your Age

How about this for a scary thought? If you cling to trying to look too young, you’ll die young. Don’t believe me?

Not long ago I found myself reading Betty Friedan’s comprehensive and compelling book, “The Fountain of Age” (1994), and I was stopped dead in my tracks by her following statement: “Mindless conformity to the standards of youth can prohibit further development… it takes a conscious breaking out of youthful definitions, for a man or woman – to free oneself for continued development in age.” Say what?

Friedan, who died last year at the age of 85, was commenting on the observation that people who participated for years in long-term studies about aging actually survived significantly longer than they were expected to.

After discounting every possible error that might have skewed the results of those studies, researchers concluded that it was actually the participation in the studies that increased their longevity. And what they think, according to Friedan, is that “those who consciously affirmed and studied their own aging in an open-ended way, as a new period of development, simply continued to find ways to keep on developing.”

Here’s the awful irony that I took away from Friedan’s insight, that the very things we’re doing to look youthful…Botox, plastic surgery, hair dye… may, in fact, be preventing us from reveling in the here and now of whatever our biological age may be. And that fact alone could actually make us die younger.

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