Quotes About Elderly

The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

We're good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides—an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys—and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.

Wilson pointed out angrily that even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly. They at least get to have swings and jungle gyms.

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family.

When my father met her, he was surprised to learn she lived by herself. He was a urologist, which meant he saw many elderly patients, and it always bothered him to find them living alone. The way he saw it, if they didn't already have serious needs, they were bound to develop them, and coming from India he felt it was the family's responsibility to take the aged in, give them company, and look after them.

Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.

we have no good metrics for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

Whenever the elderly have had the financial means, they have chosen what social scientists have called "intimacy at a distance." Whereas in early-twentieth-century America 60 percent of those over age sixty-five resided with a child, by the 1960s the proportion had dropped to 25 percent. By 1975 it was below 15 percent. The pattern is a worldwide one.

In the past, surviving into old age was uncommon, and those who did survive served a special purpose as guardians of tradition, knowledge, and history.

HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives?

The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who's eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver

Taking care of a debilitated, elderly person in our medicalized era is an overwhelming combination of the technological and the custodial.

As you get older, the lordosis of your spine tips your head forward," he said to me. "So when you look straight ahead it's like looking up at the ceiling for anyone else. Try to swallow while looking up: you'll choke once in a while. The problem is common in the elderly. Listen." I realized that I could hear someone in the dining room choking on his food every minute or so.

There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home.

Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that's because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock," Felix Silverstone

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible

Wilson spent several days camped out in one government office after another until she had secured an exemption. Unbelievably, she and her husband cleared every obstacle. And in 1983, their new "living center with assistance" for the elderly—named Park Place—opened in Portland.

He was surrounded and supported by family at all times, and he was revered—not in spite of his age but because of it. He was consulted on all important matters—marriages, land disputes, business decisions—and occupied a place of high honor in the family. When we ate, we served him first. When young people came into his home, they bowed and touched his feet in supplication.

And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly.

We end up with institutions that address societal goals-from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly-but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves

On average, in Boult's study, the geriatric services cost the hospital $1,350 more per person than the savings they produced, and Medicare, the insurer for the elderly, does not cover that cost. It's a strange double standard. No one insists that a $25,000 pacemaker or a coronary-artery stent save money for insurers. It just has to maybe do people some good.

It seemed as if, once aging led to debility, it was impossible for anyone to be happy. *

percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics