How to protect your health in a power outage
Staying at home during a power outage can be risky for your health. To be safe, take steps to maintain power for essential medical equipment, store medications properly, and prepare for other hazards.
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Staying at home during a power outage can be risky for your health. To be safe, take steps to maintain power for essential medical equipment, store medications properly, and prepare for other hazards.
Juicing can be a helpful way to meet your daily fruit and vegetable goals. While eating whole produce is ideal, a well-made juice offers key nutrients. Aim for mostly vegetables, limit fruit, and choose store-bought juices with no added sugar.
Sometimes low back pain becomes a chronic problem, lasting more than three months. This can be difficult to treat. A 2026 study of 749 adults with chronic low back pain found that treatment with physical therapy provided modest benefits over cognitive behavioral therapy.
A 2026 analysis casts doubt on the effectiveness of kinesiology tape—adhesive strips applied to the skin—to reduce pain from musculoskeletal conditions, such as arthritis and low back pain. Findings from 128 scientific reviews suggest that taping provides only modest and temporary benefit.
Bicycling offers joint-friendly aerobic exercise, builds leg muscles, and aids recovery after knee or ankle surgery. The most appropriate type of bicycle—road, mountain, hybrid, or adaptive (recumbent, tricycle, hand cycle)—depends on where people ride and their abilities.
Many older adults with scoliosis—a C- or S-shaped sideways spinal curve—aren’t aware of it. Others noticeably lean to one side, and some have pain and limited range of motion in the spine. Physical therapy, including core strengthening and improving the stability of the trunk, can help.
Resistance training at least twice a week builds strength, power, and endurance and preserves function as people age. Home workouts with body-weight movements and resistance bands are as effective as using gym equipment. All major muscle groups should be strengthened.
Guidelines recommend that women starting hormone therapy do so before age 60 and within 10 years of menopause onset. Starting later may raise the risks of heart attack, stroke, or dementia. Women who start hormone therapy at 70 or older face even greater cardiovascular risks.
A variety of disparate factors can speed up people’s biological aging, which describes how well their body functions (in comparison to chronological aging). Drivers of aging include ultraviolet light, stress, smoking, obesity, radiation, and loneliness and social isolation.
Most people with early-stage Lyme disease symptoms develop a rash, but it often lacks bull’s-eye features—which many people have been told to look for. Other signs of Lyme disease include headache, neck pain, joint aches, and fatigue.