Posts Tagged With ‘ Carolyn Rosenblatt ’

She was a heavy smoking, alcoholic, obese woman who reached her first breaking point 40 years ago. After DeEtte Sauer’s friend drank himself to death, she woke up to her own alcohol dependency. She resolved to stop drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stuck with that. She went on to quit smoking, which she found extremely difficult, but she persevered. She had never had any discipline around food and her doctors in Texas at the time just seemed to accept that people got fat as the years passed. No one told her to lose weight, other than her husband. After giving up her addictions to smoking... Continue Reading

The FDA has approved various medications in hopes of providing anything that can truly change the course of Alzheimer’s disease. But medications have failed to do so. No medication so far stops the disease nor cures it. One consistent finding in all the research studies that precede FDA approval of any drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease is that they work best in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But what does “early stage” really mean? At AgingParents.com, we see many families who have a loved one with dementia symptoms. They say to us, “Mom has a few memory problems but she doesn’t... Continue Reading

This is the hottest summer ever, news reports tell us. We stay inside, we use air conditioning, we hydrate well. But some aging parents who live alone or with only part time help at home are at particular risk. It’s not just that older people can’t regulate their body temperature as well as younger people. It’s that they can get confused and not realize danger during bad hot spells. Wandering Some families we work with at AgingParents.com tell us that Mom or Dad tends to go outside and get lost once in awhile. We call it wandering in the healthcare field. Neighbors notice and bring them back... Continue Reading

According to the Federal Trade Commission, Medicare fraud costs taxpayers $60 billion a year. Fraudsters get away with it because most of the time, no one is stopping them. Here’s a real case, in which I personally spotted the suspicious billing that immediately looked to me like fraud.  A family member we’ll call Tony had a stroke in 2013 and was significantly disabled by it, mainly losing the ability to read and to speak clearly. He can say things and you can generally get the idea but he can’t say specific nouns or names. He certainly can’t discuss feelings. I am in charge of his medical... Continue Reading

Imagine having multiple sclerosis and being in a wheelchair for 25 years. That was Eleanor, in Tennessee, feeling trapped. When her neurologist told her she would never improve, she refused to accept this pronouncement. She had a quality of defiance. Her thought: “Don’t tell me I can’t do something. I’m going to prove you wrong”. And she set out to do just that. She joined a fitness center. Think of a person with two leg braces getting out of her wheelchair and attempting to walk on an indoor track with a walker. That was what Eleanor tried. She managed to go a quarter mile, once around... Continue Reading

Artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly, it can be hard to speculate about its effects on elders. What we can see is that applied to healthcare, it could be very positive. For older adults with multiple chronic conditions, there are different doctors with different perspectives, each a specialist in one thing. For anyone who has experienced what we call “fragmentation” in our healthcare system, you may see that the doctors don’t always communicate with one another. I can imagine a central database for each patient created immediately with AI, so that any physician could immediately... Continue Reading

We hear of ageism in the workplace. Older workers are laid off and when they seek new jobs, they are discriminated against in favor of younger, cheaper, less experienced workers. We hear of ageism in the media where elders are depicted as frail, impaired, dependent and in need of oh, so many medications. We do not see a lot if images of vital, healthy elders in print, film, or social media. But we don’t hear about the real issue of ageism from health care providers in medical care. It does exist, though it is hidden. You would only learn about it from an older person who may be frustrated by... Continue Reading

Our government is currently focusing on the mental health of elders, particularly the loneliness they experience. For those with aging loved ones, pandemic related social isolation exacerbated what was already an underlying problem. Many elders do not have consistent, meaningful connections with enough others to prevent the sadness and hopelessness so many experience every day. The Face Of Social Isolation In reflecting on this, I am reminded of many lonely, isolated elders I visited long ago in my career as a public health nurse. My job involved going to the homes of those in my caseload, addressing... Continue Reading

There are plenty of aging parents out there making life difficult for their adult children, as we see from our experience working with elders’ families at AgingParents.com. A common problem for families happens when the one in charge of finances, typically the patriarch, develops cognitive impairment and can no longer safely manage the family trust and his own spending. Things can get financially dangerous. Case Study In this fact situation from a real case, we observed what it took to get the patriarch out of the position as trustee and to permit the successor, the adult daughter, to step in.... Continue Reading

Do you have a stubborn aging parent? Are you worried that he or she is doing unsafe or just plain dumb things? You’re not alone. Here at AgingParents.com, we see this scenario often, and it’s frequently about control over the family finances. Here’s an example, based on a real case with some elements altered for privacy’s sake. She refuses to give up financial control The matriarch, Wilma, age 85, decides to move to a high end assisted living facility, due to her physical difficulties. She has lived in her elegant home for 60 years and it is, of course, much more valuable than when she... Continue Reading