Rochelle Pemberton opened her mail one day to find a brochure from a local med-spa with a “personal” invitation for a free skin care consultation. She bit.

“It was fun getting my skin imaged and talking to someone about my skin,” she says. “But they sure did want me to buy something!”

Rochelle ended up not purchasing anything at that med-spa. “I want a place where I really feel like they want the best for my skin. Not where they want to sell me something.”

And so Rochelle, like many women, turned to the internet.

Women Go Online for Healthcare and Skin Care Information

Traffic at health-care sites hit 72 million visitors last year, up 14% over the previous year, according to comScore Inc., an online consulting firm. And women are using the internet more, partly as more women over 50 become comfortable with a computer.

Women are clearly hungry for reliable information on skin care products and anti-aging treatments. Like Rochelle, they want accurate, unbiased information. And doing it in the privacy of their home is an added benefit.

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Forty-seven percent of California’s older residents cannot afford to pay for basic necessities, including health care, food and housing, according to a report released on Tuesday, the San Jose Mercury News reports (de Sa, San Jose Mercury News, 2/24). The official federal poverty index, which is used to determine how government aid is allocated, does not account for regional differences in the cost of living and relies on an outdated methodology that does not reflect true costs, Susan Smith, director of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development’s California for Economic Security project, said (O’Brien, Contra Costa Times, 2/23).

Researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research and ICCED developed the Elder Economic Security Standard to assess the true financial need to cover cost of living in California (Hendricks, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/24). The index accounts for the costs of housing, food, health care and transportation based on geography and other factors.