It is, unfortunately, a common scenario. An older adult falls (as many as one-third to one-half of us, unfortunately, do; every 11 seconds, in fact). A fracture results, warranting a hospital visit followed by in-patient rehab in a Skilled Nursing Facility AKA SNF (40% of the time). The injured recovers fully and that’s the end […]
We’ve certainly come a long way from the pre-Florence Nightingale days, when one of the earliest hospitals, the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, offered dark, unsanitary, poorly ventilated wards, multiple patients per bed (many of whom were infectious), and a mortality rate of more than 40%. And yet, we’re still struggling with complications related to hospitalizations – […]
Sometimes, when there’s a difficult concept to grasp or a difficult decision to be made, it helps to go back to the basics. Start with what you know. For many of us, particularly lifelong learners, and the young, a picture – or a hands-on experience – truly is worth a thousand words. Compare trying to […]
There’s a time and a place to remain quiet. Schools now have mandatory silent sustained reading time, where students cannot speak but are engaged in the pages of a book for 20 minutes. Movie theaters warn us to silence our cell phones when it’s time for the show to begin. Silence is indeed golden at […]
It seems like just a blink of an eye ago, but 1981 – the year I officially stepped into the home care arena with my own in-home care agency – was truly, technologically speaking, a lifetime ago. Although it’s incredible to realize, since 1981, we’ve lived through the invention of IBM’s very first PC, soft […]
How do you define success? When a group of 5- to 16-year-olds were asked that very question, their answers ranged from being good at karate to being Justin Bieber. Meanwhile, a poll of the elderly (with a mean age of 80) viewed self-acceptance and self-contentment as evidence of success. And for those of us who […]
Try this: Succinctly describe (without Googling it!) the linear pair theorem. Or, to the nearest mile, list the circumference, radius, and volume of the moon. Stumped? And yet at one time, committing facts such as these to memory was of paramount importance, keeping us up into the wee hours of the morning as we studied […]
How about some fun for this Friday? And, a memory test for those of you who were born before 1955. Enjoy! What builds strong bodies 12 ways? Flintstones vitamins The Buttmaster Spaghetti Wonder Bread Orange Juice Milk Cod Liver Oil Before he was Muhammed Ali, he was… Sugar Ray Robinson Roy […]
We all know that it takes a village to raise a child, and as it turns out, the village concept carries over really well into aging. We know that isolation has an enormous impact on the emotional, psychological and physical wellbeing of older adults, with the potential for such serious consequences as depression and an […]
