Health news
living donors, including the heart, kidneys, lungs, liver, pancreas, corneas, bone and even parts of the bowel.
You cannot be a donor if you have active cancer, or some infections, such as HIV or hepatitis C, though officially there is no upper age limit.
If you do donate organs, then the rest of your body is immediately given back to the family for burial.
However organs for transplantation have to be healthy, and though occasionally organs have been used from people over 80, I have not found records of them being used from anyone of your age. Because the blood supply to them decreases with age, they are unlikely to be suitable.
Being honest, a better use of your body would probably be to donate it to a medical school, where it could be used for teaching anatomy to medical students or for research. I know from experience that you can’t learn anatomy properly from a book or videos – you need to see the real thing.
Your family can request for it to be returned afterwards for either a burial or a cremation.
Your local medical school can provide you with a consent form and information on what your relatives should do when you pass away.
I really applaud you for thinking about how your body could be useful to others when you have passed away, and hope others will be encouraged to do the same.
Stress and anxiety aren’t always bad, say psychologists.
Experts at the American Psychological Association convention said cases of the conditions are increasing in the US and Europe, largely thought to be down to better diagnosis.
However greater awareness of mental ill health can cause problems when certain emotional states are viewed as abnormal.
Psychologist Lisa Damour said: “Many people now feel stressed about being stressed and anxious about being anxious.
“Unfortunately by the time someone reaches out to a professional for help, stress and anxiety have already built to unhealthy levels.”
She said people needed to understand that stress can result from both bad and good events – being fired is stressful but so is bringing a newborn baby home.
“Stress is a given in daily life,” she said. “Working at the edge of our abilities often builds those capacities and moderate levels of stress can have an inoculating function, which leads to higher than average resilience when we are faced with new difficulties.
“Stress causes harm when it exceeds any level that a person can reasonably absorb or use to build psychological strength.”