Ten Health Fixes That Make Sense for Boomers

By Mike McClanahan

Change happens. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are cures and treatments today that were unavailable to parents’ generation.

Joint Replacement and Other Orthopedic Procedures
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons estimates that more than one in four Americans has a musculoskeletal impairment. These include pains, aches, soreness, discomfort, cramps, contractures, spasms, limitation of movement, stiffness, weakness, swelling, lump, mass, and tumors to the musculoskeletal system. Arthritis, back and knee injuries are the big three of orthopedics. They are the number two reason for all physician visits and are the leading chronic condition reported by the elderly, accounting for over 132 million visits in 2006.

There are very good reasons to consider orthopedics if you have some sort of musculoskeletal impairment. First is that it’s a quality-of-life issue. Aches and pains may be part of growing up and growing older, but if you have a condition that prevents an otherwise healthy you from enjoying the things that matter to you, you’re short-changing yourself.

Second, conditions that cause you to become less physically active bring considerable increases in a whole shopping list of age-related concerns such as cardiovascular problems, digestive troubles, including diabetes, and less obvious issues such as depression.

Third, structural problems with your muscles, bones and connective tissues don’t heal themselves; they only get worse. Sprains, strains and minor breaks and tears may heal on their own, but ripped tissues and grinding bone sockets won’t. You run considerable risk of serious, life-changing incapacity if these conditions aren’t fixed.

The good news is that orthopedic procedures are among the most rapidly-evolving in medicine. Things that used to take hours of surgery under general anesthesia and months of painful recovery are now done as minimally-invasive outpatient or day-surgeries. Other bio-tech developments such as platelet-rich plasma therapy, in which a patient’s own healing proteins are extracted from their blood and injected into affected joints, and synthetic materials to eliminate bone grafts, are showing promise.

Much of the advancement has come about as a result of athletic organizations wanting to protect the mega-millions they invest in players. Good results with minimal healing time have been the goal for decades. One procedure is named for Tommy John, a baseball player whose career looked torpedoed due to a common elbow injury that had plagued pitchers since the earliest days of the game. In 1974, John's doctor was the first to replace a torn medial ligament in the elbow with a tendon harvested from another location in hopes of salvaging his career. At the time, his doctor offered odds of 1 in 100 that he would throw professionally again. Fifteen years later, John retired from pitching at age 46. Today, “Tommy John surgery” has a success rate of 85 percent. Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers' used recently developed platelet-rich plasma therapy for treatment of injuries prior to their Super Bowl win in 2009. Dozens of other athletes have used it to successfully treat chronic ailments such as tennis elbow and tendinitis of the knee.

Most Boomers are well past their athletic peaks, but these innovations continue at a remarkable pace, offering hope for longer-term solutions to other chronic joint ailments such as arthritis. If you suffer from any of them, keep up on developments, but be wary of the quack cures and false hope that are freely dispensed on the Internet and late-night infomercials. Your best defense is a good orthopedist who keeps up with his continuing education, because this is a rapidly changing field.

Treatments to Stop Snoring and Other Breathing Problems
Snoring is only funny in the movies or cartoons. OK, it can be funny if your brother-in-law is rattling the rafters in the bedroom next to the den, too, as long as your bedroom is far enough away that it won’t bother your sleep when you head up after the Late Late Show.

But when snoring keeps you from sharing your bed with the one you love or interrupts your sleep enough to affect your behavior during the day it’s not so hilarious. The American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (AAOMS) estimates that approximately 30% to 50% of the US population snores at one time or another leading to everything from lack of intimacy to anxiety disorders to traumatic divorce. Moreover, it is a prime indicator of obstructive sleep apnea, a potentially life-threatening condition.

There are numerous non-surgical ways to alleviate snoring ranging from losing weight (as little as ten pounds might make a difference), avoiding alcohol, caffeine and heavy meals within two hours of bedtime (which might help with losing the ten pounds, too), and changing your sleeping position from your back to your side, to medical treatments such as using radio waves to shrink tissue and laser-assisted uvuloplasty that removes the uvula and surrounding tissue to reduce airway obstruction.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious condition that requires medical attention. The risks of OSA include heart attack, stroke, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, heart disease and even decreased libido. In addition, OSA causes daytime symptoms including drowsiness that can result in accidents, lost productivity and interpersonal relationship problems.

Sleep apnea (cessation of breathing) is fairly common. The AAOMS figures that twenty percent of adults have mild sleep apnea; one in 15 has at least moderate OSA. In severe cases, the apnea may last for as long as a minute or more and may recur up to 500 times a night.

People with sleep apnea may not be aware they have a problem. But sooner or later symptoms like daytime drowsiness, problems with poor judgment or lack of focus, memory loss, irritability, anger, depression or even reduced libido may prompt a mention at the doctor’s office. By themselves, any of these conditions can have a variety of causes and can be misdiagnosed, especially if you’re not fully communicative with your doc.

If your bed partner (or even worse, your neighbor) complains about your snoring, or if they tell you that you wake up gasping for breath, you should definitely consult a doctor to determine the cause. It could be as simple as curing an allergy or sinus infection or an indication of a more serious condition requiring surgical intervention. You ignore these symptoms at your own considerable risk.

Cataract Surgery
A diagnosis of cataracts used to be a sentence of progression into near-total dependency and deprivation. First, your reading ability goes, then your driver’s license, TV and movies, and maybe even the ability to recognize people or cook for yourself.

Today, cataracts can almost be good news, especially for those with Coke-bottle glasses, trifocals, contacts that don’t work so well anymore, or laser eye treatments that need remodeling.

Who would have thought in the days when we were getting poked with polio shots and diving under school desks for duck-and-cover drills that by the time it happened to us, an obscured lens in our eye could be yanked out, thrown away, and replaced with a newer, better model, curing nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism in the process? And be covered by Medicare!

Cataracts are the leading cause of vision loss in people over 55 and are the primary cause of blindness worldwide. They are a clouding of the lens and are typically a function of aging, but can also be caused by injury or illness such as diabetes. In the early stages, cataracts can be mitigated with corrective lenses, but the only cure is surgery.

Fortunately, the surgery is simple (as long as the person doing it is a trained eye surgeon), quick, and usually painless. It’s done on an outpatient basis and you’re back to normal activity the following day, presuming no complications, which are extremely rare.

The really neat thing about it is that the surgeon replaces the worn-out lens you were born with with a plastic or silicone lens that not only is crystal-clear, but also reduces or eliminates entirely your dependence on corrective lenses for near and far vision, astigmatism and other eye conditions. And since it’s a medical condition, most insurance, including Medicare, covers it.

And by the way, you can thank a World War II eye doctor from England for your new peepers. When Sir Harold Ridley was patching up a RAF pilot whose canopy was shattered by German gunfire in a dogfight, he noticed that the shards of Plexiglas were not rejected by the pilot’s eyes. Sir Harold correctly theorized from that evidence that plastic lenses could replace natural ones and development of intraocular lenses proceeded apace. Tally-ho!

Eyelid Repairs and Brow Lifts
What good is it to have brand-new eyes if you can’t open them wide enough to see out?

Some of us are genetically programmed to have skin hanging from our face like a bloodhound. All of us find it getting looser as we age. When it becomes bad enough to affect our vision, a call to the eye doc is in order.

Drooping of one or both eyelids (a condition called ptosis) is caused by weakness of the muscle responsible for raising the eyelid, damage to the nerves that control those muscles, or looseness of the skin of the upper eyelids. It can be congenital (present from birth), symptomatic of other ailments ranging from minor eye problems to cancer, stroke and myasthenia gravis, or simply part of the normal aging process.

Droopy lids and excess skin and fat deposits around the eyes can cause visual impairment, especially affecting peripheral and distance vision and make you look tired and older. If an underlying disease or disorder is found, the treatment will be tailored to address that issue, but most cases of ptosis are associated with aging and there is no disease involved.

Drooping eyelids may be fairly consistent, especially if they’re congenital, but they can also get progressively worse or come and go intermittently. New or rapidly changing ptosis needs to be brought to the attention of a professional to determine the cause.

If you and your doctor decide that a fix is in order, you can take advantage of the advancements in surgeries for ptosis and for eyelids (called blepharoplasty) made possible by the inexhaustible vanity of celebrities and aging Peter Pans around the world. Today’s blepharoplasty is usually an outpatient procedure done under local anesthesia. Typically it takes one to three hours, depending on the amount and location of tissue being removed, and you can leave later that day to recuperate at home. The surgery is usually very successful, restoring proper functioning to the eyelid(s) and has the added benefit of making your eyes look younger and fresher.

Both medical and cosmetic blepharoplasty are often done in conjunction with other plastic and reconstructive procedures such as a brow lift to help prevent recurrence by tightening up the forehead skin. It’s a good idea to make sure your doc (they may be ophthalmologists, otolaryngologists or plastic/reconstructive surgeons) has plenty of cosmetic surgery experience so you don’t spend the rest of your life looking like something just scared the beegeebers out of you.

Hernia Repair
Hernias are not just nuisances; they can be deadly if left untreated.

One of the fundamental acts of becoming male is coaxing those female gonads we’re all born with out of the belly and into their own home right out there where everyone can see them. (Well, not everyone, unless you want to attract some very unwelcome attention.) This journey comes with a price. The trail the boys blaze through the inguinal canal in the groin leaves a very tempting path for your intestines to follow, and when it happens, you need to take it seriously. If you’re brave enough (or stupid enough, or, too frequently, embarrassed enough) to endure the pain of your kishkes ripping a hole in your groin, it’s just a matter of time until enough of them crawl out to make it impossible to get them back in with external manipulation, no matter how determined and pain-tolerant you are. Take it from someone who’s been there. At that point, the hernia is said to be incarcerated, and gangrene and death are just hours away.

Fortunately, we’ve passed beyond the often temporary hack, shove and stitch techniques that were all that was available in the good old days. Today, thanks in part to reinforcing mesh and the evolution of laparoscopic surgery, fixing a ruptured gut is usually a day-surgery deal often done under a local with a minimum of discomfort, quick recovery, and a much lower incidence of recurrence than was typical in the past.

And don’t think we’re overlooking the ladies. Although inguinal hernias are less common in women, (their ovaries also trot down the inguinal canal during fetal development, but not as far and not as disruptively as in men) there are some other ones that don’t discriminate nearly as much on the basis of gender.

Direct inguinal hernias (the ones discussed above are called indirect inguinal hernias) tend to occur in middle-aged and elderly men and women because their abdominal walls weaken as they age. Femoral hernias occur when the canal through which the femoral artery, vein, and nerve leave the abdominal cavity to enter the thigh become large enough to allow abdominal contents to protrude into the canal. Femoral hernias usually occur in women and are particularly at risk of becoming irreducible (not able to be pushed back into place) and strangulated. All irreducible hernias need to be evaluated by a health-care provider. Pronto.

Umbilical hernias are fairly common at birth (10%-30% of babies of both sexes have them) and show up as a protrusion at the bellybutton (the umbilicus). They are caused when an opening in the abdominal wall doesn't completely close on its own. They usually resolve themselves gradually by age two but can appear later in life, especially in women who are pregnant or have had children.

Any time you have abdominal surgery, it creates a flaw in the abdominal wall, causing an area of weakness where an “incisional” hernia may develop. Obturator hernias are extremely rare hernias that occur mostly in older women when the intestine pokes it way through an opening in the pelvic bone. Because of their location, these hernias don’t show a bulge, but can obstruct the bowel and cause nausea and vomiting. They’re difficult to diagnose, usually requiring a CT scan, and unlike most other hernias, are usually repaired through a larger incision under general anesthesia, resulting in a longer recovery time.

Hernias can also occur anywhere the abdominal wall is weak, so any time you find a bulge in your midsection or groin area, it should be evaluated by a physician. It might be a hernia, a cyst, a tumor or any number of other things you’re better off without.

Shingles Prevention and Treatment
If you had the chickenpox as a kid (and what Boomer didn’t?) you’re at risk for this painful condition because even though you have the antibodies to prevent a recurrence of the chickenpox, those little herpes thingys may still be camped out in your body.

Herpes? Herpes! Yes, herpes—herpes zoster, to be precise. It’s the virus that causes chickenpox, and even though you normally can’t get the pox again, the virus itself can live in retirement communities next to nerve endings in your body. When it decides to come out of retirement, it causes inflammation and blisters in a distinctive pattern that is easily diagnosed by health care professionals. They are usually treated effectively with antiviral and anti-inflammatory medications, but sometimes the infection settles into nerves causing chronic pain and discomfort for months or even years.

An estimated 1 million new cases of shingles are reported each year in the U.S., and half or more of them occur in persons 60 and over. If you live to 85, your chance of having shingles is 50-50. A preventive vaccine for shingles has been developed in the last decade and is now recommended for healthy adults 60 and over. It seems effective in prevention in about 50% of people and reduces the occurrence of long-term discomfort by two-thirds.

If you don’t want to get the shot, hang out with kids with chicken pox. When they re-infect you, you don’t get the pox again, but it acts like a booster for your immune system, greatly reducing the incidence of shingles. Or eat more fruit and veggies. A 2006 study found that eating fresh fruit reduces the risk of developing shingles. People who consumed less than one serving of fruit a day had three times the risk as those who consumed over three servings. For those age 60 and over, vitamins and vegetables have a similar effect.

While most cases of shingles are self-limiting and treatable, there can rarely be some serious complications and side effects, so if you experience any symptoms, prompt diagnosis and treatment are wise.

Fixing Wobbly Wheels and Other Transportation Problems
Difficulty in walking, losing balance, and weakness in the muscles and joints of your lower extremities are not normal and often indicate serious medical conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, thyroid problems and circulatory issues.

Nor is it normal for your feet to hurt, no matter what your age. If your feet hurt, you’re going to stay off them. If you stay off them, you don’t get exercise. If you don’t get exercise, you age faster, get fat and die. Even if you work through the pain to get some exercise, you’re likely to alter your gait enough to cause secondary problems with your hips, knees and ankles. Then you get to deal with those.

Didn’t realize that a little hitch in your get-along could kill you, did you?

Each of your feet has 26 bones and 33 joints, so it’s not surprising that there are more than 300 different foot ailments identified by the American Podiatric Medical Association. And according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, four out of five persons will develop serious foot problems as they age. Most of these problems can be traced to the cumulative effect of years of neglect or abuse. But fortunately many foot problems can be treated successfully and foot pain relieved.

We won’t try to catalog all 300-plus foot conditions here, but you’d be surprised at how many start with simply neglecting common-sense foot care like keeping them clean and dry, trimming your toenails properly and wearing shoes that make sense for what you’re doing. The shoe outlets are crammed with choices that offer a little love for your barking dogs. Yeah, your legs are often your most attractive physical assets as you fight aging, so guys, if you think you look great in shorts and sandals, and gals, if 4-inch pumps are must-have gear for playing cougar, at least have some relief in the trunk. Those youngsters you’re trying to seduce don’t find walkers all that sexy.

Your feet are also like the canary in the mine shaft. They’re where many other health problems first manifest themselves, from arthritis to circulatory problems to diabetes. If you have dry skin, brittle nails, burning, tingling, cold, numbness or discoloration in your feet, seek professional care because they may be signs of serious trouble elsewhere.

And if you’re experiencing dizziness or any other stability issues, make sure the appointment is for tomorrow.

Diabetes Prevention and Management
The Islets of Langerhans are not a resort off the coast of Denmark. They’re a cluster of cells in your pancreas that only account for 1-2% of its bulk, but pack a big wallop when it comes to keeping you healthy. That’s because they’re where insulin and several other important enzymes, principally related to digestion, are produced. When they go out of whack, they cause diabetic disorders, rather unimaginatively called Type 1 and Type 2.

The good news is that both types are becoming more and more manageable and sometimes, if detected early enough, preventable. If you develop diabetes, your commitment to actively managing it plays a key role in maintaining a high-quality lifestyle.

When the islet beta cells that produce insulin are destroyed by an auto-immune disorder, as happens with Type 1 diabetes, the insulin hormone that is normally released to signal cells to absorb glucose, their primary energy source, is not there. The glucose that’s released during digestion continues to accumulate in the blood stream creating a condition known as diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening condition. And over time, high blood glucose levels can lead to vision problems, nerve destruction and heart disease. As of now, Type 1 diabetes is incurable (the insulin-producing cells are destroyed), but can be treated effectively with insulin injections combined with diet and exercise. Researchers are hopeful that stem-cells may hold promise of a breakthrough therapy or cure in the future.

In Type 2 diabetes, insulin is produced, just not in sufficient quantities, and cell receptors also become insulin-resistant, further inhibiting glucose uptake. Untreated, Type 2 diabetes can progress to Type 1.

While Type 1 diabetes is generally diagnosed in the first two decades of life, Type 2, sometimes called adult-onset diabetes, typically occurs in middle-age and older adults and is more common than you might think. It is estimated that the U.S. has 23.6 million people with diabetes, and about 20 percent of those remain undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes represents about 90 to 95 percent of cases with persons of African-American, Hispanic, or Native American origin at greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes than other ethnic groups. Poor diet and lack of exercise are two of the major culprits, but heredity plays a role, too. Like Type 1, Type 2 diabetes is treated with diet and exercise, but oral medication to stimulate insulin production and glucose uptake is often effective, replacing or minimizing the need for insulin injections. Type 2 diabetics are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease, so careful monitoring of cholesterol levels and blood pressure are important.

Symptoms of Type 1 diabetes include excess thirst, frequent urination, blurry vision, extreme fatigue, extreme hunger, and weight loss. Type 2 symptoms are similar, with recurrent skin and urinary tract infections also symptomatic.

The blood test during your annual physical typically includes glucose level monitoring, and you should bring any other symptoms to your doctor’s attention. If diabetes is diagnosed, or a condition known as pre-diabetes, he or she can guide you to lifestyle changes and therapeutic treatments that may stall its progress, possibly saving you the need for more drastic management procedures such as testing yourself with blood samples and taking insulin.

If you do need insulin, there’s a way to avoid the constant finger-pricks and injections. Several companies now make insulin pumps that, while not hassle-free, reduce the need for poking yourself with sharp objects. They require you to manually alter dosages when you engage in activities you know will raise or lower your blood sugar levels, but some will even monitor your levels for you and modify the dosage as indicated, reducing self-testing to a minimum.

Early diagnosis offers the best defense against the disease. The good news is that diabetes is much more manageable today than ever before, but it takes a commitment on your part to make it work to its best outcome.

Recognizing and Treating Hearing Loss
One in three people over 60 and half over 85 have some form of hearing loss. Some would argue that those numbers increase the longer you have been married. Tuning out your partner or coworkers is one thing, but when you have trouble hearing things you want to hear, it’s time to figure out why.

Losing some of your hearing ability can come with age, heredity or a wide assortment of injuries and diseases. Long before you have obvious symptoms, other clues may appear to indicate that your ears are letting you down may appear. If you have trouble hearing when there’s noise in the background, if the sounds of high- or low- pitched voices or musical instruments are hard to distinguish, or if you have a continuous ringing, roaring or hissing in your ears (presuming you’re not ignoring a call from your perpetually-broke brother-in-law), you need to get your hearing checked.

Age-related hearing loss is called presbycusis. It seems to often be hereditary, and nobody is exactly sure why it happens. Another cause is prolonged exposure to loud noises, resulting in actual injury to the sensitive inner ear. It’s common to construction workers, airplane mechanics, lumberjacks, military veterans and Grateful Dead-Heads. That sort of hearing trauma often manifests itself in tinnitus, a constant background ring, hiss or rumble in the ears. Ex-hipsters who indulged in a little too much chemo-herbal therapy at those loud concerts might even think it’s Jimmy Hendricks on the wa-wa pedal. It’s possible that tinnitus might be caused by something relatively benign like wax buildup in the ear. But other causes of tinnitus include drug reactions and underlying physical problems or diseases. Whatever the cause, if you have it, you need to let your doctor know.

Tinnitus can be treated by a long list of drugs, procedures and therapies. The American Tinnitus Association has a wealth of information on their web site including Q&A, the latest information on research and treatments, and advice on dealing with it.

At the minimum, hearing problems affect your quality of life and, very often, your attitude toward it. Most can be addressed with devices, just like vision problems are addressed with corrective lenses. But some hearing loss can be caused by medical conditions ranging from infections to serious problems like heart trouble, strokes, head injuries and tumors. Before you self-diagnose and waste a bundle on hearing aids and TV ears, see your doctor and find out what’s really going on. You can prepare yourself with some research by visiting the web site of The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). It’s the professional association for 135,000 audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health is another good source of information.

Don’t Let Depression Bring You Down
Are you moody, cranky, lazy? Or are you clinically depressed? As many as 20 million American adults are, depending on whose statistics you believe. But it is one of the more abused diagnoses, too, resulting in countless unnecessary prescriptions for “happy pills.”

The real disease is not only serious as a heart attack, it can even cause one, so it’s important to find out if your personality disorder is clinical or you’re just on a bummer.

Experts say that up to 80% of depressed people are not getting treatment for the ailment, which is unfortunate since most depression responds quite well to the grab-bag of therapies and meds that are out there with more and better ones popping up every year. Men are particularly likely to avoid treatment, being guys and all, with Afro-American males the largest group of avoiders at 92%, according to at least one researcher. That’s particularly troubling when you consider that they’re among the higher risk groups for heart disease, an often deadly companion to depression.

It’s important that your blue funk or curmudgeonliness not only is diagnosed correctly but that it’s treated by someone who stays up on their continuing education because some of the old standbys like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft are implicated in increased rates of suicide, violence, psychotic behavior and even physical disasters such as abnormal bleeding and brain tumors. It seems that as research progresses, the belief that serotonin processing is the major culprit in depression is being challenged. It looks like the stress hormone cortisol may be a bigger factor, especially if it’s been swishing around your brain for a number of years. That could be particularly significant for Boomers, since so many are experiencing the double stress whammy of fighting off the new generations at work while coping with the added stress of aging parents, aging partners and aging selves.

With a few exceptions, depression really is “all in your head,” so therapeutic behavior changes are increasingly seen as being as effective as medication in many cases. Isolation and loneliness are major contributors, as are factors such as illness and low self-esteem, so oftentimes a little attitude adjustment goes a long way. Things such as exercise, meditation and generally forcing yourself to enjoy life no matter how cranky you are can be as effective as dosing yourself with antidepressants.

But clinical depression is a serious ailment, so working with a pro is important. And that doesn’t mean a doctor who will hand out meds like candy. If you’re feeling symptoms of depression that last for more than a few weeks, a good place to start looking for information and help is on the National Institute of Mental Health web site, www.nimh.nih.gov.

Mike McClanahan has over 30 years’ experience as a professional communicator, writer and editor. His business and professional writing has appeared in numerous trade and industry publications including, Corporate Apparel, Photo Lab Management, Ad/Marketing Review, Info, and The Marketing Journal. He has contributed lifestyle, consumer and general interest articles to several publications including Colorado Golfer and Wild Blue Yonder, the in-flight magazine of Frontier Airlines.

McClanahan’s experience as an editor includes work on dozens of business web sites, several corporate newsletters and copy editing for Wild Blue Yonder. He has a degree in Latin American Studies, is fluent in Spanish, conversant in Portuguese and currently edits the online magazine MexicoXpatz