Miscellaneous

Medications Older Adults Should Avoid

Medications Older Adults Should Avoid
In a world of poly-pharmacy, there are some medication land mines that older adults should avoid. Some of these medications are well known like benzodiazepines (Valium). But some are a surprise to many of us involved in the healthcare of…

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Death Is Not The Biggest Problem

In her article Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death Than Make Life Worth Living Emily Dreyfuss takes technology’s oligarchs to task over their collective crusade to “cure death.” Not that curing death is a bad thing, but as Dreyfuss points…

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Why Do We Teach CPR, But Not Caregiving?

Indeed, why don’t we? This article by Dr. Richard Lindsey discusses how he enlisted help from Virginia’s college and university students to invent an app or product to improve the health of caregivers…This is the kind of intergenerational creativity we…

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Home Unfurnishing Your Parent’s Stuff

This is an excellent article by Richard Eisenberg that offers eight strategies for systematically paring down the stuff of aging parents that apparently nobody wants. It’s a necessary but ultimately awkward ritual of sorting with an eye towards aggressively casting…

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Augmented Eternity: Ready or Not

Read this amazing and disturbing article by Adrienne Matei that is published in “Quartz” entitled Beyond The Grave Technology is rewriting yet another chapter in the book on death. In addition to forestalling physical death with machines that can breath…

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Elderspeak: Annoying and Toxic

Elderspeak was first coined in the 1980s by social scientists to describe what sounded like baby talk directed at older adults. It is defined as a communication style based on stereotypes that older adults are less competent, so younger communication…

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The Rejected Power of Attorney

It turns out that the power of attorney you so carefully arranged for an aging parent may be rejected by their bank or brokerage firm because it wasn’t drafted on their form. Of course you find this out when your…

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Gray Divorce: It’s Not You, It’s Me…

Why Couples Divorce After Decades of Marriage “If you or someone you know recently divorced after 20 or more years together, you’re not alone. Splitting up later in life, sometimes called “gray divorce,” is on the upswing. In 2010, one…

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Unclaimed

This moving story from NPR is about teen volunteers in Boston who serve as pallbearers for those who have died alone and become officially “unclaimed.” Their graveside memorial includes these words: “He died alone with no family to comfort him.…

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Old Age is the Stage

Art is the great decoder of unintelligible worlds like old age. In psychology we call this decoding ‘sensemaking’ and the plays about aging in this splendid article are sensemaking at its finest. As important, they give old age a humanizing…

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