Neurosurgeon Offers Medical Underpinning for Abandoning Retirement Concepts

Morris R. Beschloss interviewed neurosurgeon Dr. James Ausman regarding aging and its impact on America's employment for the Palm Springs (CA) Desert Sun and wrote that Ausman "some remarkable solutions to the inevitable calamity awaiting this country within the next decade." Among other things, Ausman suggests that Social Security Act and Medicare have fossilized into a status quo that had already proved antiquated decades ago. According to Beschloss's understanding of their conversation:

[Political cowardice] has further imposed a retirement psychosis encompassing millions of able-bodied retirees and companies employing them. Obviously, those ailing, sick or no longer able to carry on their chosen vocation should have the opportunity to vacate the working arena at the previously designated term of 65.

But with the galloping demand for professionals and practitioners of jobs that will go increasingly begging in the years ahead, today's archaic retirement programs engender an unacceptable waste.

Ausman calls this the abandonment of "the leading generation" and thinks it has been resigned to the wasteland of what could be indispensable contributions to the critical needs of America's foreseeable future. First, as people get older they get smarter, using both sides of the brain to facilitate accumulated information, which he calls the biological basis of wisdom. Second, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases can be delayed by being mentally and physically active.

Source: The Desert Sun "Talent drain could hit workforce" (November 12, 2006)