Editor’s picks: Personality, orifices and long life

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For other, non-L.A. Times health news, check out these pieces on changing one’s personality: (I’m fine, but you ...), natural orifice surgery (exactly what it sounds like) and the slog toward a longer life.

* Some people never change. But you can -- to a degree. People can alter the ways that they respond to the world, researchers say, perhaps becoming more extroverted or optimistic. Here’s a tip: To start with, you have to fake it. Psychology Today tells how:

* Surgery scars are so 2007. A La Jolla man recently had his appendix removed via his mouth. Some women have had gallbladders and kidneys removed via the vagina. Next up: Operations through the anus. Natural orifice operations are tomorrow’s medicine today, its proponents say in Newsweek. Other doctors, perhaps not surprisingly, don’t really see the need.

* Most everyone wants to live longer. So just get on with it, Michael Kinsley writes in the New Yorker, if you can.

-- Tami Dennis

photo: Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times