If you’ve heard our AgingOptions radio program, read our blog or attended a LifePlanning Seminar, this statement should sound familiar: one of the things seniors fear most is being forced late in life into institutional care against their wishes. We would add a corollary to that statement to say that, given a choice, older people…
Your ailing parent is rushed to the hospital. Among other critical symptoms, he or she is having trouble breathing, so the emergency room physicians sedate your loved one and insert a breathing tube. Mechanical breathing keeps respiration going while doctors deal with the other medical challenges. All appears to be well. Last Opportunity to Speak?…
The doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct – we all realize that. Our physicians generally know more about us, inside and out, than any other human being. When the relationship is healthy, it is characterized by a sound sense of trust and a high degree of mutuality and openness. A patient in a strong relationship with his…
An unnerving article we just discovered in the New York Times asks a penetrating question: could the rise in rates of depression and suicide be somehow linked to increasing use of common prescription drugs, some of which are also available over the counter? This inquiry was prompted by a just-released report showing that more than…
When it comes to sleep, are you a lark or a night owl? It turns out, according to a recent research study in Great Britain that was the topic of this article on the BBC website, that those of you who fall into the “late to bed, late to rise” group may be putting your…
What if you heard of an epidemic that was causing up to 125,000 deaths each year in the U.S.? What if this epidemic was also responsible for 10 percent of all hospitalizations in the country, and was costing the American health care system well over $100 billion annually? And what if you discovered that this…
For the past several years there has been little if any obvious change in the way doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Typically, a patient starts showing some observable signs and symptoms, and they come to their doctor for neurological testing. By the time the familiar symptoms of dementia begin to show, the disease has already progressed…
It’s a medical procedure that is performed on an estimated 750,000 people in the U.S. each year. It was performed on nearly 122,000 Medicare recipients in 2016 at a cost of up to $10,000 per patient. And, says a recent study, “it’s also usually a waste, if not downright harmful.” That quote comes from this…
It’s no secret that healthcare costs in America are on the rise – so much so that the price tag for health-related expenses now makes up 17 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product. With so much money on the line, managing our own healthcare expense is critical, especially for the 58 million Americans…
What if you learned that there’s one lifestyle change you can make that could dramatically reduce your likelihood of developing dementia? A 44-year long Swedish study, just described in the journal Neurology, revealed some truly extraordinary results that may provide at least preliminary evidence of that “silver bullet” in the battle against cognitive decline. The…