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Midlife is a time when you can both expect--and be shocked by--the death of contemporaries. We experienced both reactions Thursday with the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. On the one hand, Fawcett, the 62-year-old icon of the 70s, had waged a public battle with cancer, the tabloids had been on death alert for weeks and the networks had their obit shows in the can. But just Read more...

My men's group has been meeting regularly since 1979. We began meeting when we all lived in Marin County, California and felt the need for a supportive environment to discuss the changes going on in our lives. We're seven guys who now range in age from 58 to 79. During the last 30 years, two guys have dropped out and two guys have been added. The last "newcomer" joined the group 19 Read more...

One hundred years after the first Father's Day celebration, President Barack Obama kicked off a national conversation about the importance of fatherhood. His message, while the government government can do a lot to help people, it simply cannot take the place of a father in a child’s life.  Children who grow up without fathers are more likely to drop out of school and wind up in Read more...

Clinical depression can creep up softly, enveloping it's victim, leaving them shrouded in pain. For some the pain is physical as well as emotional. In fact, experts have long recognized an association between chronic pain and clinical depression. In a new study published in The Journal of Pain, researchers at Wayne State University have found that the connection is strongest in middle age women Read more...

A pair of powerful women have made very public slips this month. On June 8th, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor fell as she rushed to board a plane for Washington; ten days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tripped and fell on her way to the White House (supplying plenty of monologue material for Dave, Conan and Jimmy). Judge Sotomayor, 55, suffered a fractured ankle, so these days Read more...

If you exercise regularly, refrain from smoking, and have scored in the genetic lottery, then you may be able to truthfully shave a few years off your age. Researchers from the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center have now found a way to calculate cellular aging, as they reported in a study that will be published in the journal, Aging Cell. Five years Read more...

What questions should I ask my doctor about sexual health after menopause? Anything and everything. Specifically, women should be asking if the symptoms they are experiencing are normal. As was evident in the REVEAL (REvealing Vaginal Effects At mid-Life) Surveys, women have simply learned to live with the vaginal symptoms of menopause, such as dryness, as a normal part of getting older. For Read more...

Empirical evidence backs up what most of us already know: Being in nature is restorative and relaxing. Merely gazing out on greenery has been shown to speed recovery time for surgical patients and reduce hostility in prison inmates. Exposure to nature can also increase our capacity to concentrate and lessen stress levels. According to other studies, elderly adults whose homes are close to a Read more...

Susan Boyle's introduction to the world stage started on a high note. Her audition for Britain's Got Talent, a soaring rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream,"  upended the notion that talent must conform to a certain standard of beauty, one that doesn't include middle-aged, matronly-figured women with untamed eyebrows and frizzy hair.  A You Tube clip--viewed by 280 million Read more...

For any midlife woman who has ever asked, "Is it just me, or does menopause make you stupid?" scientists may now have an answer. Research published this week in the journal Neurology, finds that women do not learn as well during perimenopause as they do pre or post menopause. For four years, researchers tracked 2,362 women, between the ages of 42 and 52, who at the start of the Read more...