I’m a person who is always trying to find the bright side of things so most days, I try to think of something that can “up” my mood, such as the thought that there are now four years left until the next American election turmoil.

In other words, I would describe myself as an optimist and that’s a good thing because optimism has been linked in several studies to better health outcomes.

But what about the flip side?

What if you’re a pessimist, someone who feels the glass is never full enough?

Does that harm your health?

Well, according to an 11-year-long Finnish study of nearly 3,000 people, people who were judged to be pessimists based on psychological testing at the start of the study had a 2-3 times higher risk of dying from heart disease over the course of the study than did the rest of the study participants.

On the other hand, though, and frustratingly for me, optimists did not have a lower risk of dying during the study although I am optimistic that this latter finding is actually a mistake and to that end, another recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology did find that those study participants judged to be optimists when the study was launched did in fact live longer than those not as hopeful (the only caveat is that this was a study on only women, but hey, I’m very optimistic that the same thing holds true for men, too.

Anyway, the big question is can you change your personality and pass from the darker side to the lighter side?

This is very hard to answer from currently published studies – and if you’re a pessimist, I suppose you will say it can’t be done – but I believe you can work on your temperament and if not totally eliminate pessimistic feelings, at least temper them.

For some of us, it takes work for sure, but I am very hopeful that it can be done.

Happy holidays.

For reasons that are too strange for me to understand, the flu vaccine is surrounded by more myths than Donald Trump has come up for why Hilary Clinton is more popular than him.

So if you’re hesitant to get a flu vaccine this year because you’re someone who has bought into one of those myths, especially the myth that the flu vaccine can give you the flu – it simply cannot. Period – let me try to change your mind by offering you a couple of simple but I think compelling reasons to get a flu vaccine this year.

First, getting vaccinated against the flu lowers your risk of getting a nasty bout of that very common winter-time infection, an illness that not only lasts for 7-14 days but which also produces pretty unwelcome symptoms.

How effective is the flu vaccine?

Well, the effectiveness varies year-to-year depending on how accurately the experts were when they decided which strains of flu virus to include in that year’s vaccine.

Sometimes they miss badly, of course, but last year, they did quite well so that last year’s flu vaccine was about 60% effective at preventing the flu, and hey, 60% effectiveness is nothing to sneeze at, I think you’d all agree.

But just as important as its overall preventive ability is that the flu vaccine is also quite effective at reducing the potential complications that can accompany the flu, such as pneumonia, which can, of course, be a life-threatening infection.

But for me, the overall main reason to get you all to get a flu shot every year is that widespread use of flu vaccination reduces the number of people who get sick with the flu, which in turn also reduces – obviously – the number of people who can pass the flu on, especially to people who are very vulnerable to flu complications, such as seniors – me! – and infants – my new grandson, who is still too young to get a flu shot.

So hey, do everyone around you a favour and get yourself a flu shot this year.

All the little ones and the old ones you come in contact with will be grateful to you for your effort.

To learn more about getting the flu shot at London Drugs or about booking an appointment, visit: http://www.londondrugs.com/flu.

There’s been a lot of emphasis the last few decades on the issue of “polypharmacy”, that is, patients who are taking too may drugs.

This is especially a concern, of course, for the elderly, who cannot tolerate most drugs as well as younger people can, and who also tend to develop far more complications from their drugs than younger people do, in part because seniors like me tend to have multiple health problems, and those problems can often affect how a particular medication works in us.

Plus, because seniors are often on a lot of medications, many seniors don’t fully understand how to take their meds, when to take them, when not to mix their pills, and so on, which also leads to a lot of preventable medication-related problems.

To illustrate how much of a problem this can be, in a recent study published in the journal Age Aging, over 750 “patients aged 60 and over who were taking five or more prescribed drugs simultaneously were asked about their medication”.

Only 15 % of these patients fully understood the nature of their medication use, and no surprise here, men, those taking the most meds, and the most elderly were the worst at knowing all they should know about their drugs.

So if you have to take any drugs regularly, even if it’s only 2 or 3, here’s a strategy that really cuts down on the potential pitfalls from using those meds: make your pharmacist into a very good friend.

It’s what I do: whenever I have to start on a new drug – I have had to change my blood pressure medication several times over the last couple of years, for example – I always try to ask my pharmacist about that new drug such as what are the likely side effects, what are some of the less common but more serious side effects I should look out for, when should I take my pills, with what can I take them, and how will this new pill react with the ones I’m already on, and so on.

In fact, if you’re taking 5 or more medications, there is a program called the Medication Review Service which specifically aims to answer all those questions – and some you haven’t even thought of – to help educate you about the drugs you are taking.

And one other useful medication-taking strategy that can be help a lot of people is the blister- packing service, which can help those of us who are somewhat forgetful about when to take our pills to actually take them at the time we’re supposed to.

See your pharmacist today to make sure you’re on the right track with your prescriptions.

If you believe you can boost either your IQ or even your memory by buying one of those apps that promise to “train” your brain, you may want to hold on to your hard-earned dollars just a tad longer because you may not be getting your money’s worth when you purchase such a program.

At least not according to a recent study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National (US) Academy of Sciences. Specifically what these researchers concluded by looking at a bunch of studies that measured brain performance after brain training is that although these apps and programs can improve memory or IQ a slight bit, that effect is mainly due to a placebo effect because simply knowing that you’re taking a brain training app is enough to have a small positive effect on your cognitive abilities, which fits what most “memory experts” have been saying for a long time, that is, that the science behind these memory training apps is very scant at best, and that you should be wary about their positive promises.

But if you want to maintain or even improve your brain function, don’t get too discouraged by this news because there is at least one well-established way to do that and that is to do some regular exercise, which has proven time and again to have a positive effect on brain function. Plus, it can be done for free.