Here’s yet another myth buster about growing older: Mental health disorders are not a normal part of aging. In fact, there are three “patterns” of mental health disorders commonly seen …
Continue ReadingMental Health Challenges: Help for Caregivers
Deciding What’s Important in Life: It’s in the Cards
The holiday season can make people contemplative. And quite often, it can also inspire them to accomplish one of life’s many “Shoulds” — getting affairs in order such as completing …
Continue ReadingThe Case for Slow Medicine
“I don’t consider myself a natural-born doctor,” Victoria Sweet recently told a group gathered at San Francisco’s Institute on Aging. She then described her unlikely scholastic path to physiciandom: a …
Continue ReadingStaying Stronger Longer
Most adults will lose at least 30% of their muscle mass during their lifetimes. That frightening truth even has a scary-sounding name: sarcopenia — literally translated as the even scarier …
Continue ReadingDo These Ads Make Your Life Look Sad?
Even avowed Luddites can’t claim to be totally immune to the way older people are portrayed online — when you can find them there at all: a bit feeble, immobile, …
Continue ReadingElderhood: A Geriatrician’s Eyeview
Geriatrician Louise Aronson set out to write a book that promises to “look at old age in new ways.” But the first challenge, she explained recently, was the title she …
Continue ReadingWhen the Caregiver Is the Lonely One
Potential perils of seniors suffering from loneliness are now well documented and well trumpeted. For older people, being lonely and isolated is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, they …
Continue ReadingWhen Disaster Strikes: Readiness for Seniors
In November 2018, the town of Paradise in northern California (population 26,218), known for its physical beauty, friendly residents, prolific fruit crops, and annual Johnny Appleseed Festival, was decimated by …
Continue ReadingThe Look and Feel of Downsizing
When it comes to choosing where to live as we age, the world seems to be divided into two camps: those who swear they want to be carried out of …
Continue ReadingMaking Transportation Age-Friendly
The World Health Organization launched the Age-Friendly Communities Initiative in 2006, with the laudable goal of making communities throughout the world accessible and safer for seniors. The first step was …
Continue Reading