Adapted with permission from Relax, This Won't Hurt: Painless Answers to Women's Most Pressing Health Questions. Copyright 2001 by Judith Reichman, M.D.

Turning 40 is either a milestone or a maelstrom, depending on whether you choose to (a) strut your stuff and celebrate your current health, your personal and professional attainments and your commitment to use the medical knowledge of the twenty-first century to get the most out of the next half of your life; or (b) bow in capitulation to the media and societal prediction that from here on in, you forfeit your emotional and bodily worth, that you can no longer aspire to attain the ultimate goal -- youth -- and that, even worse, your spending habits are less likely to be influenced by advertising (unless, of course, it's for Depends and denture creams).

Let's trash choice B and adopt A as your birthday motto. After all, look at all the problems and issues you had to analyze, diagnose and treat in the last decade -- and you've made it!

Your forties is your most negotiable decade. The choices you make and the way you care for yourself now can not only compensate for your past body abuses, they also set the framework (not to mention the bonework) for all of your systems for the four, or even six, decades to come. So let's go over what's happening to your body and figure out if you need to or can do anything about it.