Forever Young - Body and Mind and Spirit

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Boomers’ focus on good health and longevity also may lead to increased environmental activism. Graham Brownstein, executive director of ECOS — the Environmental Council of Sacramento — already is seeing large numbers of retirees engaging in often-dull volunteer work, helping to produce transportation plans and land-use policies.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of people in the boomer age group who’ve reached a certain stage in life and are starting to think about the challenges we face in this region,” says Brownstein, who hopes more will step up before the region reaches a crisis stage with pollution and traffic akin to Los Angeles.

MORTALITY (STILL) HAPPENS

No matter how many Himalayan goji berries we eat or injections of human growth hormones we receive, aging and mortality are unavoidable. Arthritis will still plague us, and a large percentage of us will suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s. (Doing crossword puzzles or Sudoko, now called brain maintenance, may or may not help.)

Sure, new forms of therapy such as deep brain stimulation hold promise for the treatment of ailments like Parkinson’s or maybe even Alzheimer’s, but despite the new therapies we’re all going to die and our deaths may came after lengthy illnesses that make us feeble.

Who will care for us? That’s a good question, according to Veto. He says the nation is not preparing for the aging of its population. There are only about a dozen medical schools in the country with geriatric departments, he says. In the United Kingdom, geriatrics is a mandatory part of the medical school curriculum.

“As a country, we are not at all prepared to meet the number of old people we will have,” Veto says. “We already have a shortage of nurses, and the demand for that type of profession will increase.”

Will we have enough well-equipped nursing homes for people’s final days? According to one study by the Mayo Clinic, almost 2 million Americans lived in nearly 20,000 nursing homes in 1995 at an annual cost of $53 billion. By the year 2030, 5 billion Americans will need nursing home care at a cost of $700 million or more a year. Can we pay for it? Can we build the nursing homes? Or will we have spent all our money on liposuction and goji berries?

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