Opinions (The Blog)

I want AgingOrAlzheimers.com to be a home for the realities surrounding all things aging. I aim to serve as a “Canary in the Coal Mine”, using science and reason to temper all the misleading exclamation points, breathless question marks, and wishful hype so commonly added  to popular discourse on this  subject.

Prior to now, I have never had any personal contact with or interest in blogs. Throughout the solitary process of writing this book I have been injecting my “educated opinions” in the form of easily identifiable blocks of  text. The goal was to clearly distinguish between generally accepted and published conclusions by academics and my personal inferences, judgements, and opinions (as informed by a 50-year career in basic science and medicine).  Not totally surprising, those blocks were my favorite parts to write and to reread while editing. Closing our my career and finishing the book has not tempered my desire to teach, or to be heard. This set of web pages reverses the order imposed by medical writing. Here I can present my (informed) attitudes and beliefs, with the science now primarily providing the backup, and this website’s audience the feedback.

I offer my perspectives as someone who has both been there with loved ones, and who is going there, potentially on my own.

Regarding Opinions in General:  In viewing my comments in these sections (and responses to them), the reader is reminded of the quote by Clint Eastwood’s character, Harry Callahan in the 1988 Dirty Harry movie, “The Dead Pool” (1988): “Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one.”