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I mostly hang out with parents trying to decide whether to have another baby (I was 47 when I had mine and he's now 13).  But my generation group is now in the throes of undergoing knee and hip replacements. My husband, a former college athlete, is considering both.    A new study has found that doing what we did when we were younger (not that ), can help. It's dancing, and it's helping older folks who feel less pain when they're moving around (or, as newswise.com, puts it, "movin' to the groovin'," ouch). Dancing eases hip or knee pain and helps older adults move better, according to the study by Saint Louis University. “After dancing, over several months they reported less pain and were able to walk faster,” the Web site quotes Jean Krampe, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing at Saint Louis University and lead author of the article. The findings are significant because older adults who walk too slowly are more likely to fall, become ...

We've known it for some time.  We're much better at handling pain than men.  But a new study has found that not only do we deal with it better, but women have more chronic pain than men. Writes Judy Foreman at the Wall Street Journal, " Women are 'allowed' to be emotional about their pain, and men often aren't, so perhaps women's pain gets noticed more. There are complicated hormonal factors too. There are research biases at work as well, including the absurd fact that most basic neuroscience work on pain pathways is done not only in rats but in male rats. Go figure." But she also notes that women's pain is more complex and  women and men react so differently to both pain and pain medications.  Recently, when I broke my wrist -- clearly the most painful injury I've ever had! -- I almost passed out when the doctor tried to jam the bone back into place in my wrist. Not once but many times. My husband said he, in that situation, would have ha...