In this medical business, for every person who thinks some new finding is a “yin”, there’s another one who thinks it’s really a “yang”.

Take this recent report about cell phone use from a group of British psychologists which was presented at a meeting of the British Psychological Society.

In this study based on testing more than 100 study subjects, the researchers reported that although most people who use cell phones start off using them appropriately (for some reason, they concluded that most people start using cell phones for business purposes; try telling that to any 10- or 12-year-old texting her  friends endlessly; but that’s a small quibble about the findings), most people soon end up being governed by their cell phones, that is, they compulsively check their phones for messages, and the end up exhibiting stress-related symptoms as a consequence of needing to be in touch all the time.

That, I suggest, is the yin interpretation of these findings.

The yang comes from an American psychologist who was asked to critique these findings and who said that she didn’t really see that compulsively checking a cell phone was a bad thing.

First, not only is it likely, she said, that it’s basically people who are pre-destined to be more stressed who are also those who end up allowing their cell phones to govern their lives (that’s certainly true) but also, she said, the great thing about checking a cell phone regularly means that we’re more “in touch” with the world. Although if you ask me, anyone who needs to check their cell phone or email every 5 minutes – and there are so many people who do exactly that or equally annoying, those that set their cell phones to beep as a new message comes through– are not really in “touch” so much as they are being tackled. She says that we can also multi-task more which is just plain wrong, as anyone who has ever been behind a driver talking on a cell phone and trying to drive at the same time know that this can’t be done well, folks.

No real need for midlifers to get alarmed about a recent study published in The British Medical Journal that concluded that those senior moments all us aging baby boomers now accept as a normal part of our latest transformation actually begin to happen to people much earlier in life.

In that study which looked at just under 8000 British civil servants three times over the course of a decade or so, the researchers concluded that our memories actually begin to fail in our forties, much earlier than most other studies have found.

The reason not to get too alarmed about this, though, if you just happen to be a 45-year-old who can’t suddenly find his car keys, is that the loss in memory was pretty slight in midlifers, although it did accelerate as people got older so that by the time the study subjects had reached their seventies, some of them had some pretty significant memory problems.

The other important thing to note about memory, though, before you panic, is that as the researchers for this study reminded everyone in their commentaries, there is increasing evidence that paying attention to the factors that raise the risk of heart disease and stroke – controlling cholesterol levels, for example, lowering blood pressure, doing regular exercise, not smoking, and so on – also help reduce the risk of cognitive function decline as we age, including even, if my memory serves me correctly, helping reduce the rate of memory decline.