Updated December 2025 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, badly dressed, and all alone or in the company of a doctor or caregiver. And a recent study strongly confirmed that’s not […]
More than 15 years after it was passed, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) — also glowingly or disparagingly referred to as “Obamacare,” depending on a person’s politics — has become a pawn, another arrow in the arsenal of weapons brandished between liberals and conservatives, legislators of all stripes, consumers and insurers. And […]
The Age-In. It was something of a flashback — modeled after the Teach-Ins of the 1960s, which were characterized by peer-to-peer talking and listening sessions rather than the more formalized “I’m-gonna-lecture-and-you’re-gonna-listen” teacher/student set-up. The event commemorated the 10-year anniversary of At Home With Growing Older, a group with a diverse membership of architects, advocates, social […]
There is no shortage of advice these days about how to deal with the “problem behavior” of people who have dementia, many of whom get more resistant as their conditions decline. Many of those urgings seem impossible to follow; some of them too wonky, too time-consuming or too expensive. In fact, the best advice may […]
Old age is getting younger. Thanks to a decrease in smoking, improved healthcare, safer working conditions, and widespread childhood vaccinations, life expectancy in the United States increased during most years after World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. The increase in American life expectancy flattened in the mid-2010s because of the opioid epidemic and […]
Updated December 2025 Architect Erick Mikiten ticks off some of the top reasons many people fear growing older: perceived threats of being institutionalized, aging out of relevance, becoming progressively more isolated. And, he says, these are the self-same traits that must be avoided in architectural design. Mikiten argues that architects must update designs of homes […]
Updated December 2025 Chances are you may be one of the 66 million family caregivers in the U.S. charged with attending the needs of a loved one — or will join their growing ranks one day. Either way, you are likely aware of the many practical and emotional challenges involved in navigating life while providing […]
At a recent lecture titled “Making a Difference to Seriously Ill Older Adults,” Louise C. Walter, Chief of the Division of Geriatrics at the University of California-San Francisco, first answered the question she’s asked most often: How old do you have to be to get treated by a geriatrician? To the surprise of many, geriatrics […]