Stacy Tessler Lindau and Natalia Gavrilova of the University of Chicago analyzed data about health and sexual activity collected by two nationally representative surveys. The surveys involved 3,032 adults aged 25 to 74 and 3,005 adults aged 57 to 85 between 1995 and 2006.

Men were more likely than women to be sexually active, report a good quality sex life and be interested in sex, the researchers said in a paper published online by a British medical journal called BMJ. Those gender differences increased with age and were greatest among those aged 75 to 85. In that group, nearly 39 percent of men but less than 17 percent of women were sexually active and nearly 71 percent of men and less than 51 percent of women who were sexually active reported having a good quality sex life.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE WASHINGTON POST:

The Checkup – Maintaining a sex life.

If you wanted a preview of what life will be like under Obamacare, your dose of reality came this week. A government task force said women in their 40s don’t need annual mammograms, tossing out cancer screening guidelines that have been accepted for decades. Their report didn’t argue that mammograms have saved lives, on the contrary the study finds that for every 1,000 women in their 40s who receive routine testing, two cases of cancer are detected. The study also notes that 98 out of that 1,000 will have “false positives.” Meaning something looks cancerous, but further testing proves negative. The report stated that routine mammography for women in their 40s wasn’t worth the downsides, such as “false positives” and the exposure to radiation. The panel concluded that self-breast examinations were unnecessary too, as these proved to fall within the high range of “false positive.”

Welcome the world of Obamacare, where the 85 percent of us who are satisfied with health care will now watch the core of our coverage stripped away in the name of cost control. Remember earlier this year at one of his infamous town halls the President spoke about “unnecessary procedures” driving up the cost of health care and in the future such procedures would be eliminated? Well this is where the chopping begins. Apparently to the President and his Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebeluis, saving 2 lives out of 1,000, is not worth the high cost involved. Moreover, as for those other 98 women with the “false positive,” I assume Obama and Sebeluis believe they are wasting money too. As for your granny, the panel recommends cutting off testing for women over age 75. As the President put it “maybe you’re better off taking a pain killer.”

Now where do we go from here? I predict within the next year, thanks to these new federal guidelines insurance companies will discontinue mammogram reimbursements for women under 50 and over 75 years. When Obamacare finally kicks in, coverage for mammogram testing will not be an issue for debate since the private insurers will have already established economic precedent. That my friends is how Obama will make health care affordable for everyone, by eliminating routine but necessary testing one step at a time.

Last September, in his health speech before Congress, Obama spoke about preventative procedures like “mammograms and colonoscopies” being key to keeping longterm costs down. Apparently, the President is prepared to say anything, anytime to make his argument even risking the health of the majority.

One thing you can certainly count on, the First Lady Michelle Obama will have a mammogram before she hits 50, and it will be you and I the American middle class who will be paying for it.

“I had to read the guidelines twice because I really couldn’t believe women in the 40-49 age bracket were being discouraged from having mammograms,” says Fought, who lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “That’s foolhardy. They’re playing with people’s lives.”

Fought is one of many breast cancer survivors and doctors who are outraged over the guidelines released Monday by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advising against routine mammograms for women in their 40s.

The task force doesn’t argue that mammograms have saved the lives of many women like Sara Fought. In fact, the task force mentions in its statement that for every 1,000 women in their 40s who receive routine mammograms, two cases of cancer are detected. However, it also notes that 98 women will have “false positives.” In other words, the mammogram will pick up something that looks like cancer, but that further testing shows actually is not.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR CNN ‘I want my mammograms!’ – CNN.com.

Body Pump went beyond body sculpting and incorporated strength training with REAL weights (we actually used barbells, not dumbbells). It would involve a circuit of exercises that would target all major muscle groups for a full hour. This was when my love affair with weight training began. After teaching the class for a couple of months, I started to see my body transform into a leaner, more sculpted one. I fell in love with the muscles I developed and felt sexier and stronger. Today, although I’m not teaching anymore, weight training is core to my exercise regimen.

When I see women and men running endlessly on the treadmill and then complain that they don’t look the way they want, the first thing I tell them is that they are overdoing the cardio and should stop running so much! It is a myth that cardio is the best way to lose weight and to maintain a healthy weight. Here is why strength training is the secret weapon to weight loss and overall health:

1. Increases Lean Body Mass: Strength training helps to keep our body fat to lean body mass ratio lower. This means we look better and feel stronger. But even more importantly, it impacts our metabolism…the speed at which we burn calories.

2. Increases Your Metabolism: Average adults see a 2% – 5% reduction in metabolic rate every 10 years. This makes it more and more difficult to keep unwanted weight off. As we mentioned above, however, strength training increases muscle mass which makes your muscles stronger. Stronger muscles, in turn, take up and burn blood sugar more efficiently and for a longer period of time than does cardio.

3. Reduces Risk of Injury: Strength training increases muscular and bone strength, and also improves function of tendons, joints and ligaments. All of this increased strength in your musculoskeletal system enhances your balance, flexibility and functional ability. This leads to a decreased chance of sustaining an injury that can be painful, debilitating and costly.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS, CLICK THIS LINK FOR HEALTHY LIVING: The Secret Weapon of Weight Loss and Physical Health | Healthy Living on Sheer Balance.

The organization suggested the situation could worsen if the rate of premature births increases.

Each year, 12.9 million infants — or nearly 10 percent of the annual worldwide birth total — are born before 37 weeks of development in the womb, the organization said. More than 85 percent of the premature births occur in developing countries in Africa and Asia.

“Premature births are an enormous global problem that is exacting a huge toll emotionally, physically and financially on families, medical systems and economies,” March of Dimes President Jennifer Howse said in a statement. “In the United States alone, the annual cost of caring for preterm babies and their associated health problems tops $26 billion.”

The March of Dimes report, which used data collected by the World Health Organization, breaks down premature birth rates by continent.

The highest premature birth rate is in Africa, where 11.9 percent of births each year are preterm, with more than 4 million premature deliveries annually. In populous Asia, although the preterm birth rate is lower at 9.1 percent, the number of premature births is higher, at nearly 7 million a year.

While North America — consisting of the United States and Canada in this report — counts fewer than 500,000 premature births a year, its preterm birth rate is close to that of Africa, at 10.6 percent of all births, according to the report. The rate is the world’s second highest.

In the United States, the rate of preterm births has increased 36 percent in the past 25 years, with births between the 34th and 36th week of gestation accounting for the majority of the increase, the organization found. Much of the hike in preterm births is linked to more pregnancies after the age of 35 and the use of fertility treatments that can lead to multiple births.

“Wherever trend data are available, rates of preterm birth are increasing,” the report said.

Infants who survive premature birth face lifelong health risks, including the possible development of cerebral palsy, blindness, hearing loss, learning disabilities and other chronic conditions, according to the March of Dimes.

“Preterm birth is a global problem that needs greater attention by policymakers, researchers, health care providers, the media, donor organizations and other stakeholders,” the report said.

“The marked disparities in preterm birth along racial/ethnic lines in many high-income countries and the concentration of preterm births in Africa and Asia also clearly indicate that addressing preterm birth is essential for reducing the pronounced inequities in neonatal health and for the world to achieve,” it added.

FOR THE CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR CNN.COM: Report: More than 1M preemies die in first month annually – CNN.com.

The reason I’m worried is that the wrong diagnosis is being made.

As any doctor can tell you, the most crucial step toward healing is having the right diagnosis. If the disease is precisely identified, a good resolution is far more likely. Conversely, a bad diagnosis usually means a bad outcome, no matter how skilled the physician.

And, what’s true in personal health care is just as true in national health care reform: Healing begins with the correct diagnosis of the problem.

Washington is working on reform initiatives that focus on one problem: the fact that the system is too expensive (and consequently too exclusive.) Reform proposals, such as the “public option” for government insurance or calls for drug makers to drop prices, are aimed mostly at boosting affordability and access. Make it cheap enough, the thinking goes, and the 46 million Americans who can’t afford coverage will finally get their fair share.

But what’s missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what’s even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn’t fulfill its prime directive — it does not help people become or stay healthy. It’s not a health care system at all; it’s a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly.

It’s impossible to make our drug-intensive, technology-centric, and corrupt system affordable. Consider that Americans spent $8.4 billion on medicine in 1950, vs. an astonishing 2.3 trillion in 2007. That’s $30,000 annually for a family of four. The bloated structure of endless, marginal-return tests; patent-protected drugs and “heroic” surgical interventions for virtually every health problem simply can’t be made much cheaper due to its very nature. Costs can only be shifted in various unpalatable ways.

So, a far more salient question that must be addressed is: Are we getting good health for our trillions? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding, “No.” The U.S. ranked near the very bottom of the top 40 nations — below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica and Dominica — in a rating of health systems by the World Health Organization in 2000. In short, we pay about twice as much per capita for our health care as does the rest of the developed world, and we have almost nothing to show for it.

I’m not against high-tech medicine. It has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. But our health care professionals are currently using it for everything, and the cost is going to break us.

In the future, this kind of medicine must be limited to those cases in which it is clearly indicated: trauma, acute and critical conditions, disease involving vital organs, etc. It should be viewed as a specialized form of medicine, perhaps offered only in major centers serving large populations.

Most cases of disease should be managed in other, more affordable ways. Functional, cost-effective health care must be based on a new kind of medicine that relies on the human organism’s innate capacity for self-regulation and healing. It would use inexpensive, low-tech interventions for the management of the commonest forms of disease. It would be a system that puts the health back into health care. And it would also happen to be far less expensive than what we have now.

If we can make the correct diagnosis, the healing can begin. If we can’t, both our personal health and our economy are doomed.

FOR THE CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THE LINK FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST:  Dr. Andrew Weil: The Wrong Diagnosis

Dr. Andrew Weil is is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. His latest book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine that Can Transform Our Future, will be published on September 8, 2009.

FEEDBACK:  PLEASE CONTRIBUTE YOUR THOUGHTS

That is what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill or just okay to experiencing UltraWellness.

Most people don’t know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more aren’t just annoying symptoms. They are early clues to impending diseases that can disable and kill us.

Most heart disease starts in the womb. You can detect brain changes in teenagers that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life. Most cancers take more than 30 years to grow to the size where they can be detected.

How can we address problems that we don’t even know we have?

There is an answer. It lies in the revolution that is happening in medicine today. That revolution is called functional medicine. I call it UltraWellness, and that is what you are going to learn about today …

How I Found the Real Cure for Chronic Illness

One in three Americans has some type of chronic disease — and most of the rest of us are headed toward one. Most of us don’t feel as well as we should or could if only we understood how to care for and feed our bodies the way they were designed.

Conventional medicine helps at the very end stages of disease. If you are very sick, have an emergency, break a bone or have a raging infection, then, yes, conventional acute care medicine is the right solution. As former emergency room doctor and the husband of an orthopedic surgeon, I am glad we have this care when we need it.

But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM and over the waterfall to their death.

I began to wonder what led them to this point — what happened UPSTREAM in the process of disease and illness. What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place.

The early influences on my thinking–from Asian philosophy, to nutritional biochemistry, to the study of ecology and ecosystems — all helped me form new and different view of health and disease.

I am one doctor who is part of a movement that is on the cutting edge of an entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It is called systems medicine, or functional medicine.

It provides a way of understanding all the influences on our biology that are at the root of illness and how our lifestyle and environment interact with our genes to create the imbalances or balances that are the real determinants of disease or health.

This medical view does not reduce symptoms and diseases to their component parts and traditional specialties, but studies the entire ecology of the body and its environment.

I have practiced this model for over 15 years and seen miracle after miracle, day after day. People don’t only get relief from symptoms, they get truly well. That is why I have called this approach to health UltraWellness.

It is the answer to the crisis we find ourselves in — an increasing epidemic of chronic disease and an impending economic collapse as more of our resources are put toward caring for the chronically ill.

Today, medicine is in a serious predicament. The way we understand health and disease no longer reflects biological reality or the biological laws of nature. We need to understand that diseases are not fixed things that you catch or that just show up out of context, but are related to the environment, your diet, genes, and lifestyle.

Dr. Mark Hyman: The 7 Keys to UltraWellness: Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Heal.

The small study included five members of the Stanford women’s tennis team. For two to three weeks, the athletes maintained their regular schedules, sleeping and working out as usual. They took part in sprinting and hitting drills to measure their performance. Then the players were told to extend their sleep to 10 hours a night for five to six weeks.

After increasing sleep, the athletes performed better on all the drills. Sprinting drill times dropped on average to 17.56 seconds from 19.12 seconds. Hitting accuracy, measured by valid serves, improved to 15.61 serves, up from 12.6 serves, and a hitting depth drill improved to 15.45 hits, up from 10.85 hits.

The findings were presented last week at the Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. The study was small, and some of the improvement may have been the result of additional practice time. However, the size of the change suggests the athletes received a direct benefit from more sleep.

The study’s lead author, Cheri Mah, a researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory at Stanford University, said the athletes who took part in the study also felt better and realized for the first time the real effect sleep could have on performance.

Katherine Hobson, who writes the “On Fitness” column for U.S. News and World Report, said she decided to hang up her running shoes and catch up on sleep during a recent vacation.

I expected my first run back in Brooklyn to be a death march. Instead, I felt the best and went the fastest that I have in weeks. One possible explanation came to mind: I erased my chronic sleep debt on vacation, thanks to sleeping in as long as I wanted in the mornings and napping most afternoons, which made me extremely well rested when I took that run.

Over at Runner’s World, Mark Remy notes that many runners focus on “carb-loading” before a race, but perhaps they should also try “sleep-loading.”

We runners obsess over speed work, long runs, tempo runs, hill runs, lactate threshold, resting heart rate, carbs, protein, recovery drinks, stretching, massage, ice baths, shoes, technical fabrics, gels, and about a hundred other variables.

But most of us, I bet, don’t give sleep a second thought. It’s crazy, if you think about it. How can we expect to run well if we can’t stop yawning?

What do you think? Have you noticed a difference in your workouts depending on how much or how well you sleep?  Reporting by Tara Parker-Pope for the New York Times.  For more news and information, click the link below for the www.nytimes.com.  Support your local newspaper and the New York Times.

via To Improve Fitness, Try Sleep – Well Blog – NYTimes.com.

And this time it is repackaged for a younger generation who may not remember the Today Sponge — or the 1995 episode of “Seinfeld” in which Elaine hoarded her stash, for use only with boyfriends she deemed “spongeworthy.”

At one time the Today Sponge, a spermicide-coated polyurethane barrier placed in the vagina to inhibit sperm, was the most popular form of over-the-counter birth control for women. Now, a new distributor is introducing it again this weekend, hoping to reclaim that status.

Introduced in 1983, the sponge first disappeared from drugstores in 1994 after some manufacturing problems. It reappeared in 2005 under new ownership, which spent millions to promote the brand before selling it to another company. That new proprietor declared bankruptcy in late 2007, taking the Today Sponge out of production last year.

Left stranded were any number of loyal devotees who describe themselves as “sponge fans,” eagerly awaiting its latest comeback.

“I was completely devastated when it disappeared the first time,” said Louise Rozett, a freelance book editor in Brooklyn, who had used the sponge to avoid hormone-based birth control pills. “I was so angry when it disappeared again.”

The new distributor hopes to bring some stability to the brand. The Today Sponge is scheduled to go on sale by this weekend at 6,500 CVS and Longs Drug Stores, the distributor said. This summer, it is scheduled to also go on sale at 6,700 Walgreens stores.

Notably, though, for all of the product’s pop-culture spongeworthiness, the new distributor has only modest sales expectations.

Compared with the birth control pill and condoms, the Today Sponge may generate comparatively little revenue. It can have a failure rate of more than 10 percent. And it does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

“I think the previous owners thought, ‘It’s such an iconic brand thanks to Seinfeld, it’s going to be swept off the shelves,’ ” said David Mayer, president of Mayer Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., the distributor, whose company also makes the Kimono brand of condoms. “I think the sponge has a place, but it’s not going to become the be-all to all women.”

At its height, when the brand’s original maker spent $10 million a year on advertising, the brand had annual wholesale revenue of $22 million, Mr. Mayer said.

But he expects significantly decreased sales now. This is partly because his company plans to spend only $1 million on advertising this year. Another reason is that health experts who once thought the spermicide component inhibited sexually transmitted diseases now warn that the material may actually increase the risk of transmission, he said.

If the reintroduction of the sponge attracts both new customers and its previous loyal audience, the brand might now sell two million sponges a year, packaged in boxes of three at a retail price of $14.99, Mr. Mayer said.

At a wholesale price of $9 a package, that would work out to about $6 million annually in wholesale revenue — a minuscule amount compared with the nearly $3.5 billion that Americans spent on prescription birth control pills last year, according to IMS Health, a medical information company. And it would be far behind the approximately $263 million the nation spent on condoms in the last 12 months, according to Information Resources Inc., a market research company.

Still, past experience indicates that the sponge will have a clientele among women who seek control over their own contraceptives and the convenience of a product that does not require a doctor’s prescription.

And whatever its business prospects in 2009, the Today Sponge has a cultural status that transcends its role as a mere drugstore convenience. The “Seinfeld” riff helped recast birth control not as a medical decision but a lifestyle choice, suggesting a brand marketing strategy later employed by estrogen pills like Seasonale and Yaz.

Moreover, despite a popular culture that freely discusses and depicts sex, “spongeworthy” has come to symbolize the rare, successful comedic send-up of pregnancy prevention.

“Every one who is sexually active and has used birth control has a bad birth-control story,” said Andrea Tone, the author of “Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America” who hold the Canada research chair in the social history of medicine at McGill University in Montreal. But “we don’t do great condom scenes or great diaphragms on the ceiling scenes, even though it’s such great material for comedy.”

Originally developed in the 1980s, the Today Sponge was pulled off the market in 1994 after inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration found bacterial contamination at its manufacturing plant. The brand’s owner at the time, Whitehall-Robins Healthcare, decided that the brand’s revenue was too small to justify bringing the plant into line with manufacturing standards, according to an F.D.A. statement at the time.

Then came its brief revival, ending in bankruptcy.

“Women become fond of certain devices and then what do you do when it is discontinued?” said Dr. Troy, the medical historian. She recounted shipping a few “sponge care packages” from Canada, where she said the Today Sponge had remained continuously on sale since 2003, to friends in the United States.

“The sponge was popular enough that people missed it,” Dr. Troy said. “And there was enough underground talk about it that there is probably an expected and ready market.”

Ms. Rozett in Brooklyn is one of the sponge-ready customers. On Wednesday, she sent an e-mail message to CVS customer service asking when the Today Sponge would go on sale at her local store.

“I was so frustrated,” she said, “by the fact that they were giving it to us and taking it away, giving it to us and taking it away.”  Article by Natasha Singer for the New York Times.  For more news and information, click the link below for the www.nytimes.com.  Support the New York Times and your local newspaper.

Contraceptive Sponge Makes a Return to Pharmacy Shelves – NYTimes.co.

“The voters are getting what they asked for, but I’m not sure at the end of the day they’re going to like what they asked for,” said Jim Earp, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents the hard-hit construction industry. “I think we’ve crossed a threshold in many ways.”

California is looking at a budget deficit projected at more than $24 billion when the new fiscal year starts in July. That is more than one-quarter of the state’s general fund.

This week, voters said they no longer want the Legislature to balance budgets with higher taxes, complicated transfer schemes or borrowing that pushes California’s financial problems off into the distant future. In light of that, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made it clear he intends to close the gap almost entirely through drastic spending cuts.

The governor’s cutbacks could include ending the state’s main welfare program for the poor, eliminating health coverage for about 1.5 million poor children, halting cash grants for about 77,000 college students, shortening the school year by seven days, laying off thousands of state workers and teachers, slashing money for state parks and releasing thousands of prisoners before their sentences are finished.

“I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect real lives,” Schwarzenegger said. “This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento is not Washington — we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what we have.”

He also has advocated selling state assets to raise cash, including the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and San Quentin State Prison.

The Democrats who control the Legislature do not want major spending cuts, but so far they don’t have a plan for closing the deficit. And if their solution is higher taxes and more borrowing, they will probably not have enough Republican votes to get the two-thirds approval needed for passage.

The crisis is a sort of political comeuppance for Schwarzenegger, who took over a state with a projected $16 billion gap in 2003 and promised to end California’s “crazy deficit spending.”

The gap has two primary causes: The state has been living beyond its means for years by spending generously on all sorts of programs that the voters, the politicians and the special interests wanted. And the recession has hammered California’s economy.

Personal income declined this year for the first time since 1938 and unemployment is 11 percent, one of the highest rates in the nation. Nearly $13 billion in tax increases and $15 billion in cuts enacted earlier this year, as well as billions in federal stimulus money, have not been enough to make up for the drop-off in revenue.

“This is the year everything has fallen apart,” said outgoing Assembly Minority Leader Mike Villines, a Republican from the Central Valley. “We don’t have an alternative. We’re literally at the day of reckoning and have to cut it all out.”

The drastic cuts that appear to lie ahead will, by accident, accomplish the stark reduction in state government that many Republicans have long advocated.

“We should have been limiting the growth of government for years,” Villines said.

The crisis also has prompted talk of a complete overhaul of the way California government operates.

A group of business leaders and good-government groups has begun the process of calling for a convention to rewrite the California Constitution.

A separate commission is expected to release a proposal to rework the state’s tax structure, which is vulnerable to booms and busts in California’s economy because it relies heavily on high-income earners. The state also has few limits on what state government can spend and a small rainy day fund that can easily be raided by the politicians.

Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat who has joined a group seeking to change the state’s budget system, said too many services that used to be performed by local governments have been taken over by the state because of a landmark 1978 ballot measure that drastically limited property tax revenue. Hertzberg said the programs, and the money, need to be sent back to counties and cities.

“The real problem of California is that we need to bring government closer to the people, so that the role of the state is much narrower. We need to focus on big-picture stuff,” he said.

In the near term, the huge cuts that are about to hit will probably affect nearly every one of the state’s 38 million residents. Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal, for example, would eliminate health care coverage for more than 2 million people, about 1.5 million of them children, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California.

“It would place their families in financial jeopardy for any ailment, injury,” he said. “A child won’t be able to see a dentist if they have a toothache or see a doctor if they don’t have the ability to see the blackboard at school.”

The state also faces a related problem: Every year, California borrows money on the bond market to cover its day-to-day expenses and pays it back when tax receipts flow in. But the tight credit market and questions about California’s ability to repay its obligations could make borrowing difficult or extremely expensive this fall.

Schwarzenegger and some Democratic lawmakers have asked the Obama administration for a federal loan guarantee — or what some are calling a bailout. The move would be virtually unprecedented and would require the approval of a reluctant Congress. Article by Juliet Williams for the Associated Press. Associated Press Writers Judy Lin, Tom Verdin and Samantha Young contributed to this report. For more news and information, click the link below for Yahoo and AP News.

Please leave your comments below.

California faces its day of fiscal reckoning – Yahoo! News.