Random Thoughts

I found these beautiful fans in a small, Barcelona shop last month and just couldn’t resist buying one.  There was a time when I considered a fan a mere tool for alleviating menopausal hot flashes.   Now, I see it as a feminine, fashion accessory that I can whip out on hot days or during a particularly claustrophobic plane trip. Who has to know why you’re fanning anyway?  If you have a fan that’s as pretty as these are,  you’ll likely be asked where – not why – you bought it.

Jennifer Boire (aka Ms. Menopause) has written a wonderful poem on Weight Gain and Menopause on her blog.  She’s put into words what we all notice and think about as our bodies change with age, and she’s done it with humor and honesty. I love it!

Oprah kicked off her first program in the New Year with a show about her year-long odyssey with health problems and weight gain.  She told viewers that everything in her life –and body –was humming along until she hit 53, when, as she put it, “life took over.” She had heart palpitations. Her blood pressure was creeping up.  She was having trouble sleeping and was so exhausted during her entire 53rd year that there had been times when she didn’t even want to go to work.  (sound familiar?) She stopped exercising and ate more. Her friend, the exercise and nutrition guru, Bob Greene, told her she seemed depressed.  “There’s a dullness about you - you’re not really there,” he recalled saying to her.

Though Oprah has mentioned in the past that Dr. Christiane Northrup’s book on Menopause was helpful in figuring out what was happening to her, and her website offers several links to articles on the topic, Oprah nevertheless attributed all of these symptoms to thyroid disease (cured now) and the fact that her life was out of balance.  But to me, and probably every other 50-something viewer who has been through the same experience, it sure sounds like Menopause. Unfortunately, she didn’t utter the M word once during the one-hour show. What a missed opportunity to educate millions of women! [click to continue...]

A New York Times editorial published yesterday, “Whose Best Interest?” called upon all pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily participate in an online database of all payments made to doctors for speaking and consulting services. They also stated their support for a Senate bill, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which would establish a mandatory national registry of payments of all kinds to physicians – including gifts, payment for clinical investigations and stock options .

Why is this important to menopausal women? [click to continue...]

Because it’s Menopause Awareness Month, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails about products aimed at helping women ease, or at least cope with, the most disruptive symptoms of menopause – hot flashes, night sweats and insomnia. I haven’t tried them myself, but you might find them helpful.  Here are a few to consider: [click to continue...]

This past weekend, I attended a confab of women bloggers here in San Francisco. I thought I’d be the oldest one there, but I was fortunate to have participated in a “meet-up” of “Boomer & Beyond” bloggers and I met some terrific, wise women with pretty cool blogs. [click to continue...]

There seem to be an onslaught of books and articles about the importance of appearing younger that are targeted to women in their 50s, which means ME!!! I didn’t realize that I was in trouble until I read Jesse Kornbluth’s review of Charla Krupp’s, How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger on his blog, Head Butler. Kornbluth, who usually tackles more literary and intellectual content, felt compelled to call his readers’ attention to this book due to the social and economic fallout that happens to women when their beauty declines. Ouch! [click to continue...]

Over the weekend, I turned on the TV for one hour in the afternoon and just about every commercial was for a pharmaceutical drug. I was appalled. I think the ads condition people to think that there’s a magic pill for nearly every ailment, so why be vigilant about your health? I wondered what a foreign visitor to this country would conclude about our culture after watching this endless promotion of drugs.

What is not so widely known is that many of these medications can be so detrimental to your health that even some physicians won’t take them, according to a recent Men’s Health article . Here’s a list of eight drugs that physicians told the author are on their own “do not take” list.

• Advair (for asthma)
• Avandia (to control diabetes)
• Celebrex (anti-inflammatory)
• Ketek (antibiotic)
• Prilosec (for acid reflux)
• Nexium (for acid reflux)
• Visine (for eye redness)
• Pseudoephedrine

These are well-known, commonly used medications and for some people, they’re life savers. But the decision to use them shouldn’t be taken lightly.

It’s a sign of the times. Every one is talking or writing about middle-age memory loss, or so it seems. I doubt that anyone who is 25 years old has noticed the same thing, of course. They probably didn’t notice when vibrantBrains, a “gym” for improving memory function, opened recently in San Francisco. And they certainly weren’t interested in a lecture there last week by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, the author of “Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife.” [click to continue...]