Sex gets better with age, study says 70-year-olds said they get it on now more than they did 30 years ago.

Two interesting things stand out about this.

First, my poor wife.  Every time I see those Viagra commercials I always have to laugh when they state ‘If you have an erection for more than 4 hours, seek immediate medical attention.’  Seriously, if I’m saluting for 4 hours, me thinks my wife will need medical attention more than me Popeye.  And if more 70-year olds are putting notches in the bed post, I’m thinking men may start catching up to women in life expectancy - for two reasons, surely you can figure those out.

Secondly, we live in a mostly retired, mostly elderly area in Florida.  The part where Ferraris come with matching strollers complete with logos on the handle bars.  Now for the next few weeks when I see my elderly friends, I will have to think twice about why they grin so much.  And I thought it was because they know we have 5 kids - none of which have been teenagers yet.  Now I know.

Oh, and like it or not Mom, you’re closing in on this population segment.  Disgusting.

Last week was rather exhausting.  My Aunt Katie died and it wasn’t an option for us to ‘not’ attend her funeral and be there with my cousins.  When we googled the drive to be 16 hours, we did what we do - we loaded the kids with a days notice and hit the open road.

Well, that was our first surprise, the road was closed, er at least narrowed to a frustrating degree.  The drive in reality took 21 hours and instead of arriving the night before for the showing and getting a good night’s rest, we pulled in at 3:30am, set the alarm for 4.5 hours sleep then spent the day with family we hadn’t seen in quite a few years.  And it was all worth it - it was a very nice service in which a few of the family and friends stood and told some memories of Aunt Katie for whom our youngest daughter received her middle name - Kathryn.

Aunt Katie was in hospice type care for the last year after falling and breaking her leg.  And the beauty of it was that my cousin Lynn worked at the hospital and spent a lot of time caring for her.  I have no doubt Aunt Katie was very well cared for - probably spoiled.

Rather than make a bee-line back home, we jetted 3 hours in the opposite direction to see my step-father and mother who 3 weeks ago, slipped on the near-Spring sidewalk ice (been a rough winter up there) at work and broke her back.  So she was pretty miserable and needed some TLC.  Having lived with the misery and pain of 2 herniated disks from a car accident nearly 20 years ago (wow, I feel old saying that!), I have a little inside track into back care and pain management.  Of course, the hospital’s approach it to wait it out with some pretty strong, addictive drugs.

Screw that.  The four days we were there, Julie made meals in bulk, we cleaned because my mother would clean even if she had to crawl, and I strategically massaged her back a few times a day.  She started sleeping like a baby and didn’t need to rely on the drugs.  Go figure.  She had a set back the few days after we left as, apparently massages are addicting as well, but now, still in some pain, she’s back on the mend and her spirits are back.

The point of all of this is: we need to bring health care back into the home.  We need to be more responsible in our own health care.  We still treat doctors, the FDA and AMA as Gods.  If you haven’t experienced it for yourself (and I’m sure you have), they are human just like the rest of us, and just like the rest of us in our jobs and daily lives, they get tired and are prone to miss (or worse yet, create) mistakes.  And, let’s face it, you’re not their family - their immediate responsibility, so your treatment is mostly business, not personal.

I was reminded of this all last week in our travels and again today when I saw this link on Failure to Rescues.  A failure to rescue is when a patient dies from an unrelated or unrecognized complication.  And, according to this article, between 2004 and 2006, 188,000 patients died (128 out of 1000 at-risk) in the US because a nurse or doctor didn’t see, recognize or treat dire symptoms.

Read the article - there’s a boy who died like this - even while his father insisted that something wasn’t right - he was assured that it was normal.  His 6-year old boy died.  He’ll never learn to drive, go on his first date or rush out of the maternity ward walking three feet off the ground with a handful of cigars.  Nothing normal about that.  It’s tragic.

The point is: your doctor/nurse may be able to name all of the bones in our bodies and may be able to read a cat scan, but he/she doesn’t know (nor do they have time to know in today’s medical practice/business model) what is normal for you.  They don’t know about your financial stress, problems with the in-laws or your struggling business/job.  And they simply don’t have the time or for that matter, the personal margins to spend with you and completely assess your situation.

Wouldn’t we all be better off if we just honed our common sense, asked tough questions and sought out pharmaceuticals and doctors ONLY for dire needs?  What we have here is a failure to rescue our common sense and to take care of our basic survival needs.

If you’ve been around me enough to talk about health care in America, you know I’d like to meet the dumb bastard who organized the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).  Food AND Drug.  Drugs and Foods.  No matter how many times I say it, I don’t get it.

Unless of course I think in Capitalistic terms - e.g. money.  Food and Drugs.  Garbage in, garbage out, here’s a pill for your garbage, cha-ching.

There’s a new article on MSNBC courtesy of Men’s Health - “What if bad fat isn’t so bad?”.  The gist of it is that in over 50 years of studies and trials, saturated fats have never been proven to cause heart disease.  Rather, there was some really intriguing correlation both for and against the theory.  Mix in a little word of mouth, convenient advertising and the correlation of support ‘for’ became the truth.

Which reminds me of the Mark Twain witticism: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.”  Ah, we need more people today like ole Samuel Clemens, Will Rogers, Mae West and Yogi Berra - you know, people who saw things for what they were and put humorous wraps on their wisdom.  Nah, today we have Al Gore who has all of the energy and wit of Mount Rushmore.  Now, I like him, didn’t vote for him (in hindsight a mistake - sorry Al), believe he cares about our collective initiative to eat our own limbs and complain about it.  But where is the wit in the wisdom - the ability to laugh at our own gluttony and stupidity?  Coo-coo-catchoo, where have you gone Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, George Carlin and Billy Crystal??

I guess I would sum up this report of how the FDA is a machine designed and built to feed itself with one of my favorites from Yogi Berra - “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  Use your head - common sense rather than continuing to listen to the man behind the curtain - The Wizards of DC.  Is fat really bad for your diet??  I think not but don’t get angry at me.  Aim your anger at the FDA and all of those cheap carbs food producers throw at us or the AMA who validated, then gave us and then pulled Vioxx, Trasylol, Permax, Rezulin and on and on.  Wait, first the trials were perfectly acceptable with acceptable risks, then they weren’t.  Ok, I see, you therefore know about as much as Joe Schmoe about the benefits/risks of the medicines you prop up.  Or perhaps the pharmaceutical game is a lot like a slot machine.  If it pays out, keep it.  If people complain and you lose, change seats.

Where are the real answers?

Why such increases in cancer and allergies?  Air conditioning, caulk, insulation, pesticides, household chemical cleaners, formaldehyde in aspartame and corrugated boxes, chlorine in tap water and much, much more.  Garbage in, sealed in, garbage can’t get out.  Where does it go?  Lungs, kidneys, liver, lymph nodes, joints. The FDA/AMA’s answers: enter Singulair, Allegra, Celebrex, Spiractin and thousands more.  My answer: get off your ass, go outside where we’ve been for thousands of years and mingle with nature and release yourself from your 4 walls and princely, pest-free mansion.

Why such increases in heart disease and obesity?  Cheap, high quantities of carbs and automation that has reduced our physical output to pushing buttons.  Remote controls, ATMs, computers, cell phones. MP3 players, XBox, car windows, car washes and more.  Garbage in, garbage can’t get out.  Where does it go?  Arteries, stomaches, intestines.  The FDA/AMA’s answers: enter Coumadin, Lipitor, Zicor, Zantac and thousands more not to mention yoyo diets and MSG, Aspertame and other labratory-made drugs that rape us of our sensibilities.  My answer: move your ass, wash your car, paint something in the summertime heat, scrub something - or as the old timers use to say it: use a little ‘elbow grease’ and get rid of anything in your kitchen with Aspartame and MSG (also known as monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed soy protein and many more AKAs - read more here.

Then of course everyone is stressed out paying the bills for these toys with buttons, air-tight houses and of course, health insurance and medical bills.  Where does that stress go?  Road rage, school and work shootings, marriage counseling, ADD for our children and to our heads in the form of depression, sleep disorders, restless leg syndrome, strokes, aneurysms and migraine headaches.  The FDA/AMA’s answers: enter Prozac, Ritalin, Lunesta, Mirapex and thousands more.  My answer: shake your ass, get your energy out, release those endorphins, testosterone and acidic build up in those seldomly used muscles.

So, let’s recap: get off your ass, move your ass, and shake your ass.  We just solved the healthcare crisis in America.  But is anyone listening?

We could continue to listen to the FDA and the Wizards who pull our strings and offer us up unproven, clinical trials, billions of dollars of research and years of incompetent research by experts with multiple degrees and disciplines of study.  We could.  Or we could wake up, America, open our eyes and choose to take the other fork in the road.  The fork that utilizes common sense, good judgement and involves both taking control of your life, health and environment.  The fork that utilizes less dependence on pharmaceuticals, pesticides and electronics.  All of those have a place and can improve our quality of life - to a degree.  But where are the great witticists to make us laugh at how our gluttony and dependency on for-profit snake oil is getting the best of us.

We need someone to remind us that if we are not smart enough to choose the correct fork in the road, then we should not complain when we get forked on the other.

So nobody plans with doom in mind.  Everybody, I think, is optimistic when it comes to planning their lives and establishing goals.

When planning a business, you are more likely to dream of the millions that you’ll make selling out to Google than you are to think of the horrors of cold-calling and the possibility that you may lose everything you own.

When planning to lose weight, you are more likely to dream of the six-pack abs and tight bum you’ll have than you are to think of the hours of pushing yourself to exilarating exhaustion and the pizza/donut/ice cream pity party you’ll throw if you fail to hit your target weight within 2 weeks.

When planning a wedding, you are more likely to dream of the spicy love, endless romance and spontaneous, adventurous travels than you are to think of the weirdness of your spouse using the toilet while you shower or your spouse running around in their favorite, holey undergarments and sleepwear or the pain of divorce and how you’ll split time with your future kids.

When planning a vacation, you are more likely to dream of the warm sun, great tans and freedom from your life than you are to think of the bills you pay when you return, the sun burns and the emotional let-down of returning to a job you hate.

And, if you are like me, when planning a family, and in my case a very large family, you are more likely to dream of the people your children will one day become because of your guidance and tutelage - how they will change the world, how they will marry and have beautiful, healthy and happy children - than you are to think that one day, you may all get the flu and you will see bodily functions you don’t want to see - and because of such a large brew, you will see more quantity than you ever dreamed possible.

Oh yes, we are a closer family this week having survived the flu.  One day the kids were going to an innocent birthday party and the next we were all crawling and sleeping on the floors.  Lots of laundry, lots of carpet cleaner, lots of toilet paper and, yes, lots of love.  You have to love people to witness and clean up that.

On a side note:
If you happen to experience the flu and would like to bypass the puking as Jul and i did - here’s a secret.  Aluminum calms the stomach.  That’s right, we avoid aluminum anti-persperants and all other digestible metals, but when it comes to the flu, it’s a trade-off we accept.  If you have no aversions to magnesium or aluminum (read the label!), check out Maalox, but only the liquid ‘regular’ version with aluminum hydroxide.  It calms the stomach and while Jul and I both were on the brink of cusping the porcelain, we held it off with the aluminum Maalox.  Otherwise, it would have been a nearly unmanageable week of hell.

In my email box today from 2 major news organizations:

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS DIABETES DRUG AVANDIA, USED BY MILLIONS WORLDWIDE, INCREASES RISK OF HEART ATTACK AND DEATH IN PATIENTS BY ALMOST 50 PERCENT

No!  Really??  Say it isn’t so!  Not another pharmaceutical whose clinical trials were swept under the rug until real people outside of trials started dying and their families started filing lawsuits.

In our Building Your Ideal Life seminars and in my upcoming book, I put a great deal of focus on health.  Really, how can you have your Ideal Life if you don’t have good health?

And to my surprise, in seminars or in individual coaching, people are not at all taken back my by harsh stance and beliefs that the pharmaceuticals are doing as much harm as they are good.  Don’t get me wrong, medicine can be a wonderful thing, but only short-term.

The other night, we saw a commercial on television that went like this: “when I took this drug, combined with a better diet, my cholesterol dropped 30 points!”.  REALLY??  How much did it drop because of that subtle phrase “combined with a better diet”?  And wouldn’t it have dropped considerably with ONLY a better diet?

Seriously, if these pills are so great, I should be able to live at the fair like Templeton the rat (from Charlotte’s Web if you don’t have kids ;) - pop a few pills and look like Tyra Banks.  Sing with me - “The fair is a veritable smorgasboard-orgasboard-orgasboard”.  The fact is, everyone of these ‘wonder drugs’ comes with serious side-effects and the legal disclaimers that ‘results may vary’ and they ‘work best’ when combined with regular exercise and a good diet.

But don’t go blaming pharmaceuticals.  It’s not their fault.  They are for-profit businesses with demands and responsibility to their shareholders to make money.  It’s our fault.  If we didn’t buy it, they couldn’t sell it.

I cannot help but wonder what kind of pharmaceuticals and treatments we’d have if these companies were non-profits.  Certainly their research dollars could come from our taxes.  People wouldn’t mind transferring money from government programs like the “Antarctic Artist fund” to research diseases and health issues, would they?

So pharmaceuticals are much like palm readers, celebrities, pornography, space travel and weapons of war sold in your local gun shop in under 30 minutes.  You could easily make the case that none of these have a place in advanced civilizations, but then again, they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t need hope, false idols, fantasy, exploration and fears.

I guess you could file pharmaceuticals under ALL of those categories.