Other Side of 50

The cost of medical and dental care is typically the largest expense for older Americans. Fortunately, some of these bills may be tax-deductible. The 2016 tax year could be the last time adults age 65 and older can take advantage of a lower threshold for deducting a portion of your medical and dental expenses. If [...]

We humans tend to take our senses for granted—until they stop working as well as they had in the past. It’s a well-known fact of life that our senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste) all decline as we age. Our vision, especially, tends to get worse with age. We may be less able to [...]

My friend Lloyd, who has a demanding full-time job, is helping to care for his in-laws, who’ve moved closer to him due to their declining health. He shared with me that he’d been to the pharmacy eight times last month and was beginning to resent the amount of time he spent there. “The prescriptions my [...]

It had been a long time since I’d been around someone with the actual flu, but over the New Year’s holiday two of my friends came down with the virus. Now I can clearly see I hadn’t given the flu enough respect. One friend is a working mom with two children under the age of [...]

With a yearlong waiting list to enter a skilled-nursing facility for long-term care, my father was placed on palliative care at home recently. While it may not seem so, it was an early Christmas gift for our family. The occupational therapist who had been helping teach my mother and sister how to safely transfer my [...]

As we age, our memories seem more significant, and more vivid. Holidays are a great time for sharing memories. At our holiday events we inevitably end up in fits of laughter, holding our sides and wiping away tears. Some of our stories get retold each year. Like the time my dad was using a blowtorch [...]

“It feels good to be a part of the universe as it shines upon others,” Acorn’s“Family Man” columnist Michael Picarella recently noted. Why is helping someone an action we associate with the feeling of being happy? One explanation is that in doing so we experience “vicarious joy,” or the pleasure we get from improving another’s [...]

Earlier this year, history.com cited the “Seven Most Contentious U.S. Presidential Elections.” The current election had not, at that point, made the list. I think it is safe to say that during this past presidential race, very little grace was shown at a time when our country could have used courtesy and goodwill from our [...]

Most of us know that hospital staffing is made up of doctors and nurses. But if you haven’t visited a hospital lately, you may not know about the evolving set of specialties found in today’s hospitals. Where is my primary care doctor? A relatively new trend in the care of hospitalized patients is the “hospitalist,” [...]

An individual typically takes one of two paths to a skilled nursing facility: straight from the hospital or from home when they become too frail or sick to care for themselves. In the first case, when the stay is for temporary doctor-ordered rehabilitation, the patient rarely has a say about which facility they’re transferred to. [...]