Advice To Live By From A 100-Year-Old Practicing Doctor
Ephraim Engleman is a doctor still going strong at 100-years-old. He joined the arthritis clinic at the University of California, San Francisco in 1948.
His advice for living up to and thriving at 100 is very contrary to conventional medical advice. Yet it all makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
He lives by 10 commandments, which he attributes to his longevity. Below are some of his recommendations.
He recommends:
- Choosing the right parents
- Choosing the right spouse
- Doing crossword puzzles
- Keep breathing
- Enjoying your work, whatever it is
- And having sex
He doesn’t recommend:
- Traveling by air
- Taking vitamins
- Falling down
- Doing the type of activity that leads to falling down
- Exercising
- Watching what you eat
You can read a bit more about him here or see the video below.
Image credit: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle
Great article. But how does one choose the right parents? Does this imply the time you spend with your parents?
Hi Robin,
Good question. You’d have to ask Ephraim 🙂 But yes, on a deeper level maybe it means choosing how you see and interpret your parents. No one is perfect and as we get older it might be easy to see fault in them, but it’s best to see the positives and learn from them, as opposed to focusing on the negatives. But, again, just a thought. Only Ephraim knows 🙂
I think the doctor was humorously acknowledging that he was lucky to inherit genes with rare potential. It’s common among people with unusually slow aging to mention their lifestyle habits aren’t much different than the rest of us. I still remember George Burns chomping his cheap White Owl cigars to nubs.