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By Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
Guest Blogger

In their recent post on Boomer Consumer: The Blog, Matt Thornhill and John Martin excitedly reported on reasearch being conducted on a synthetic chemical that improves the physical stamina of laboratory mice on a treadmill by 44 percent over mice not taking the medication. The discovery is leading to speculation that  an “exercise pill” might be created for humans so that they won’t need to exercise to be physically fit.

Thornhill and Martin gushed:

The revelation is particularly pertinent to boomers who have reached an age in which their physical fitness is experiencing a steady, seemingly inexorable slide. Although many boomers have incorporated exercise into their lifestyles more passionately than previous generations have, that commitment requires a tremendous effort. Who wouldn’t like to spend less time on the treadmill and more time playing Sudoku or snoozing in the hammock?

They go on to describe the success of Viagra, and report that scientists are researching chemical compounds that can halt the effects of aging on memory and mental processing speeds.

“Although it’s a long journey from a chemical that works on mice in a lab to a drug safe for humans, it may be only a matter of time before ‘exercise pills’ become a reality,” Thornhill and Martin said in their post.

Then they end their post with this pie-in-the-sky comment about prescription drugs: “How long before there’s a pill to effortlessly perfect every human frailty?”

Thornhill and Martin head up the Boomer Project, which educates marketers on how to communicate with boomers. They are authors of “Boomer Consumer: Ten New Rules for Marketing to America’s Largest, Wealthiest, and Most Influential Group.”

Prescription drugs have side effects

About two million serious adverse reactions to prescription drugs occur a year including 100,000 deaths, according to Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group. These tragedies are one of the five leading causes of death in the United States.

Public Citizen recommends that consumers not take a prescription drug unless it has been on the market for seven years; an exception is breakthrough drugs. The consumer group makes this recommendation because many new drugs are “cousins” of drugs already on the market, and often their side effects aren’t well known.

In their enthusiastic envisioning of anti-aging drugs, Thornhill and Martin left out information about recent failures of the pharmaceutical industry. Some include:

• Vioxx, used to treat the symptoms of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, acute pain, and painful menstrual cycles was pulled from the market in 2004. An estimated 84 million people worldwide used Vioxx, and it was one of the most frequently prescribed drugs in the United States, according to the Web site Lawyerseek.com. Vioxx was the largest drug recall in history at the time.

• America has the highest rate of mental illness in the world, according to Stephen Bezruchka, M.D., author of “Is America Driving You Crazy?” The number of Americans suffering from mental illness has nearly doubled since 1987, when Prozac was introduced. Bezruchka believes our drug-based system of care is fueling this epidemic; the drugs used to treat depression and mental illness cause problems when used long term.

• Other prescription drugs recalled or withdrawm from the market include: Rezulin, used to treat type 2 diabetes; Fen-Phen, a diet drug; and PPA, an ingredient used in some appetite suppressants and cough medicine.

What can boomer consumers do

Boomer consumers need to be informed about the prescription drugs they take. Ask your health care providers and pharmacist about side effects and drug interactions. Do research on the Internet about any prescription drugs you are taking or plan to take.

In addition to Public Citizen mentioned above, The People’s Pharmacy is a good source of information on prescription drugs.

Read books about the pharmaceutical industry. A recent book by Melody Petersen offers new, chilling information about the increased dependence of Americans on prescription drugs. It’s called “Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs.”

A recent series of articles I wrote for my blog The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide, called What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs, also provides useful information. The articles are:

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: The Problem

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: What You Take and What You Spend

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: How to Buy Prescription Drugs

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: How to Avoid Ineffective and Dangerous Drugs

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: Prescription Drug Reform

What Boomers Need to Know About Prescription Drugs: How to File Reports About Adverse Drug Reactions

For more information for boomer consumers, see my blog The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide.

By Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Guest Blogger

Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Mehmet Oz, professor of surgery at Columbia University, teamed up yesterday to present a great show, “Dr. Oz on Aging: How to Turn Back Time.”

One hundred audience members were preselected to take an aging test. They filled out a quiz at home and had a physical exam, which included push-ups and sit-ups.

The results weren’t good. The 100 people were ranked as follows:

• 1 – outstanding

• 0 – aging well

• 18 – average

• 81 – not aging well

The woman with the outstanding score said she runs, lifts weights, swims, cooks most of what she eats, and has a happy home life. The woman with the lowest score said she smokes, drinks, eats poorly, and doesn’t exercise.

People in America are making subtle mistakes in lifestyle choices, Oz told Winfrey’s audience.

Oz said his book, “You: Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty (You),” with co-author Michael F. Roizen, offers information on how to make changes that will give you vitality as you age.

The brain begins to shift and think about the world differently in 14 days, he said.

In three months, people can start to affect their life expectancy. In three years, nearly any negative past behavior can be reversed, Oz added. “Remember you can’t get rid of your bad habits. You’ve got to replace them with good ones.”

The No. 1 major ager is stress, he said.

Ways to reduce stress include:

• Breathing deeply and practicing meditation, yoga, and chi-gong, which is a method of working with energy within the body.

• Licking the lips then sucking in air with the lips slightly open.

• Placing a cork vertically between your teeth.

Other major agers are a diet high in fat and sugar, not getting enough exercise, lack of sleep, and too much exposure to sun.

On what to eat, Oz said whole grains, beets, and raisins contain magnesium and are major antioxidants that help to reduce stress. Oranges, grapefruit, bananas, avocados, and yogurt help lower blood pressure. Tomatoes, blueberries, carrots, and broccoli can boost your immune system.

Click on Major Agers on Oz’s Web page “Health: You Staying Young” for details on what ages you.

Oz and Winfrey discussed telomeres, which I’d never heard of before. They’re like shoelaces at the tip of the chromosomes, Oz said. When the caps of telomeres begin to wear off, due to stress and other factors, the telomeres become frayed and cells can’t be replaced.

The telomeres in people who are old and frail have worn off, he said, adding all organs can be replaced if telomeres aren’t damaged.

“Aging is about replacing what’s broken,” Oz told Winfrey’s audience.

If you can’t walk a quarter of a mile in six minutes, it’s an indication you’re not aging well, he said.

A cutting-edge blood test – the Biophysical250 – also gives a health assessment on how you’re aging. It costs $1,500 to $3,400.

Other options, Oz said, are to use the 14-day plan in his book and ask your doctor for certain tests. The tests are blood pressure, blood sugar, thyroid, and red blood cell count.

Good sex – meaning in a loving, committed relationship – helps keep you young, and it adds three years to your life, he said.

On brain health, Oz offered a Brain Test worksheet to the audience. If you can cross out the Hs in 40 seconds, you have good brain agility.

However, he told the audience they didn’t need to worry if they missed too many Hs. The aging process can be turned around.

See Oz’s 15 Ways to Maintain Your Memory slide show.

Winfrey offers a series of 16 short Web pages on the show on her Web site. It’s worth looking through if you’re a boomer consumer interested in living a vital life for years to come.

For more information for boomer consumers, see my blog The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide.

So which is it? Is it a Silver Tsunami of retirement of Baby Boomers OR is it just a wave? Well, The recent report on BusinessWeekOnline attempts to address this question and tries to bust the myth supposedly common among many.

Did you know that even after the youngest Boomer reaches retirement age, the total number of Boomers retiring would not be 78 million, but more like a 46 million when adjusted for people that never worked and other factors? 

Read the article (watch the video interview) on BusinessWeek Online.

There have been numerous mentions, analyses of this interview in the blogosphere. I will only reference just a couple here.

The ‘50 + Digital’ posted the following in their blog. In this blog, Mark correctly points out that the real issue is not who is retired or not (although this is the real issue for those businesses spending big time banking on the upcoming wave of retirees), but it is the impending aging and the resulting health and other issues that eventually crop up.

Also, part of the reason many aren’t retiring is because of the lack of savings in their retirement accounts. One can not afford to retire on a $50,000 or $70,000 balance in their retirement accounts, unless they can count on a nice pension check or some other source of income. Believe it or not, this will affect the Gen X generation even more so than the Baby Boomers. But many years from now. This is so because, by the time Gen X’ers retire, pensions would have more or less disappeared and they can’t really count on Social Security benefits. So they have to basically pay for their retirement from their own savings. And as we all know, as Americans our saving habits are not very impressive. So one choice to afford the extended years of living is to not retire.

My dear friend and Boomer411 co-founder, Raj Setty has this great blog post on this subject. Regardless of how close or far you are from retiring, answering these questions that Raj asks in his blog can work as a checkpoint for your retirement preparedness…

1. When do you plan to retire?

2. How much money should you have to make this dream a reality?

3. How much money should you earn this year to reach the goal outlined in #2?

It takes some financial discipline to reasonably answer question #2 above. It helps to know how much you are spending on a monthly basis and which of these expenses you expect will continue into your retirement. Also, it is important to note that upon retirement one has more time to spare and might want to travel around or get involved in some other activities. Each of these cost a lot of money and these expenses need to be planned as well. Not to mention that the cost of healthcare increases drastically with one’s age. So take a deep breath and face up the facts. May be you are well prepared or may be you are not. But this is your life. So wouldn’t you rather make a well-educated move than a hasty one?

For more on this subject, read our interview with Catherine Kitcho, author of the book, ‘Happy About Being a Baby Boomer: Facing Our Newfound Longevity’. You might want to buy her book for more help on figuring out how much money do you really need to retire and live well.

GM is coming out with vehicles that are more adaptive to older eyes, older bodies. And other automakers are thinking to follow suit. As Baby Boomers get older and reach retirement age, along with it come the health related issues and reduced eyesight. This is hightime for automobile makers to take notice and redesign the cars to accommodate this changing needs of Baby Boomers. Make no mistake. For those manufacturers that sieze this opportunity, it is big business. Apparently, GM is coming out with vehicles equipped with high-tech gadgets that help with blind-spot monitoring, lane departure warnings and so on.

Chuck Nyren of the Advertising to Baby Boomers blog has posted the following nice post covering the recent Business Week article on the subject, ‘The coming Boom in Boomer Friendly Transport‘, as well as his own prediction on the topic much earlier. This articles also talks about the need for the roads, road signs themselves to change to be more convenient on the aging bodies. Click on the links above for further reading on this topic.

If you have aging parents who stay independently in their homes; you know the feeling of wanting to ensure their safety. You’d probably want to have a way of being alerted in case he or she falls down in their home and is unable to get up. Basically, a simple way that allows them to live their lives as independently as they’d like; yet a means for you to be alerted when they need your help, would make our lives more enjoyable. Such tools would be very empowering, if used correctly. Imagine the stress and the cost that could be saved  by avoiding or altogether delaying trips to skilled nursing home facilities, by taking advantage of such tools.

Well there are many such tools already available on the market and at an affordable cost when you compare to the cost of skilled nursing home care. Check out this link to find articles and tools pertaining to this topic. Although, some of the products discussed may be in their early stages, there are other products that are available and useful immediately depending on your situation.