Anti-Aging Remedies

Here's looking at you. Have you ever noticed that actually, the person you see when you peer into the bathroom mirror with partially closed eyes seems very little different from that guy you remember in college? Maybe this is some inner method of decreasing the pain of the reality of getting older staring back at you. While driving, you glance up at your rearview mirror and discover more white hairs growing from your temples. "Oh heck," you rationalize, "I look so distinguished with gray hair around my temples. So my hairline is receding. Who's perfect?"

But societal respect does not necessarily lead to statistical prominence. Even today, in spite of all the stories in the news about the significance of older adults, studies show that physicians actually spend significantly less time with nursing-home patients (often, mere seconds) than with middle-aged, office-based patients. In the ongoing debate on health care, any proposed "rationing" of medical procedures seems to favor younger people because they rank higher on the priority list than older people. The very elderly, and especially the institutionalized aged, frequently become not only everyone's burden but superfluous.

Such aspects of aging could certainly lead to a certain amount of understandable stress and anxiety...if we let them. At 40, potentially with more years behind us than ahead of us, reality can start to sink in.. .if we let it. Our forties and beyond can be considerably worrisome as we face our own mortality. We can also find ourselves caught between the Scylla of aging parents and the Charybdis of rambunctious, acting-out adolescents, with the siren song of a midlife crisis on the horizon.

If this isn't scary, then you just aren't alive, man.