Link to article in The Washington Post that lists the escalating costs of care, particularly for those requiring memory-loss assistance with their activities of daily life.
May we suggest grandma’s advice?
Go outside and take a walk, on the beach barefooted if possible, move your body, eat your greens, stay hydrated, maybe even drink carrot juice! Enjoy your life, and avoid toxins (e.g., ultra-processed foods) when possible which could greatly increase your chances of not needing “senior care”.
This article is a textbook case for the importance of getting one’s affairs in order to prevent becoming a “victim of the system”
Good estate planning that is kept current, naming truly appropriate fiduciaries, and keeping those fiduciaries up to date on your situation (give them your estate planning counsel info) - and notifying your financial institutions and medical providers of the planning (give them copies), - AND being HONEST with the fiduciaries about your condition … a lot of people don’t want to admit they are losing capacity or ‘bother’ other people with the news of serious medical treatments, etc., etc. - taking these steps goes a long ways toward avoiding the issues highlighted in this article.
Unfortunately U.S. hospitals need to turn beds like restaurants need to turn tables and one way of getting a no-longer-profitable patient out the door without liability is through a court-appointed guardianship, possibly giving a stranger control over the bank accounts of the “evicted”, not yet well, patient when there are family members who might help if only they had been contacted, which can take time and time is money… so not always the best attempts are made to contact relatives/friends. Documents we can help you make will help make your wishes known if you are temporarily or partially incapacitated, including people to call that you trust should any such guardianship need suddenly arise.
Click image to read full article originally published by The Washington Post
“This system trusts a person to be a guardian angel, but people are not.”
frontotemporal dementia: What are the symptoms of FTD?
In photos and video obtained by the Daily Mail, the Bruce had a day out with two friends in Santa Monica, Calif. on Thursday, March 2nd, 2023 (and clearly made time for grounding himself in the warm moist sand, one of our favorite activities!)
By Richard Sima
Kelyn Soong
Caitlin Gilbert
and Marlene Cimons
The Washington Post
February 16, 2023 at 9:07 p.m. EST
Actor Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a rare type of dementia, his family announced Thursday. The disease, also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration, has no treatment or cure.Willis’s family said in March that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a communication disorder, and was retiring. In their announcement Thursday, Willis’s family said his “condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia.” Article in its entirety here...“It’s a relatively recently described disease,” said Constantine Lyketsos, director of the Johns Hopkins Memory and Alzheimer’s Treatment Center and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “We’ve heard of Alzheimer’s for over 100 years” but FTD is much less common, he said. “So the fact that it’s more recent and less common means we know much less about it than we’d like to.”
Want to live to be 100? Here’s what experts recommend
The recent death of the world’s oldest person at age 118 highlights the growing number of centenarians around the world
By Teddy Amenabar
The Washington Post
3.7 million centenarians by 2050!
January 25, 2023 at 12:50 p.m. EST
Experts predict that the number of centenarians — people who live to be at least 100 years old — will continue to rise in the coming decades. While genetics play a large role in healthy aging, physical activity, social support and where you live also can influence your chances for living a very long life. Continue to articleFeds to investigate overuse of antipsychotic drugs by nursing homes
by Cara Murez
medicalxpress.com
January 18, 2023
U.S. health officials say they plan to investigate whether some nursing homes are falsely labeling patients as schizophrenic so they can administer sedating antipsychotic drugs to them.
”While less than 1% of people have schizophrenia, 99 U.S. nursing homes have claimed that at least 20% of their residents have the condition, the news report noted.” Read entire article here.
The same technology to monitor babies is sold as elder care monitoring technology.
By Heather Kelly
The Washington Post
The tipping point came nearly seven years ago when 82-year-old Evelyn was still living alone in her Georgia home. She was in good shape physically, still sharp mentally, and able to manage her daily tasks. But after a health scare, her family made a “nonnegotiable” decision they hoped would help the grandmother of eight stay independent even longer. They installed a Wi-Fi camera inside her home.It took some convincing. Evelyn told her daughter Terri Davis, somewhat jokingly: “I think you’re putting in a spy camera.”
“I assured her we had lots to do with our busy lives and wouldn’t just be watching her,” said Davis, 65. “We’re just going to peek in a few times a day like in the morning to make sure she got up, that the night was OK.”
Now Evelyn, who declined to use her last name for privacy, is in an assisted-living center. The camera is still with her, and she also wears a medical alert button around her neck. Nearing 90, Evelyn is tech savvy enough to text and check Facebook and Instagram on her iPhone, and she knows how to unplug the camera when she is not in the mood to be seen. (continued here)
If you're a senior and walking to the mailbox takes longer than it used to, new research suggests you might want to ask your doctor to check your thinking skills.The study included nearly 17,000 adults over 65 and found those who walk about 5% slower or more each year and also had memory declines were the most likely to develop dementia. continued at medicalxpress.com
The Mystery of 9/11 and Dementia
By Patrick Hruby
The Washington Post
Many first responders are experiencing alarming cognitive decline. Is their time at Ground Zero to blame? More than a decade after the twin towers fell, Ron Kirchner began forgetting things. Buckling his belt. Closing his car door. Once, while visiting a preschool class on the 13th anniversary of 9/11, he even neglected to wear his customary necktie and New York City Fire Department hat. “He was in a panic,” say his wife, Dawn. “He used to like to bring the kids something, like coloring books. And he couldn’t find anything.
”This was unlike Ron, who had always been devoted and dutiful….By Michelle Cottle
The New York Times
Getting Old Is a Crisis More and More Americans Can’t Afford
Growing old is an increasingly expensive privilege often requiring supports and services that, whether provided at home or in a facility, can overwhelm all but the wealthiest seniors. With Americans living longer and aging baby boomers flooding the system, the financial strain is becoming unsustainable...
WASHINGTON - For-profit nursing home providers that have faced accusations of Medicare fraud and kickbacks, labor violations and widespread failures in patient care received hundreds of millions of dollars in “no strings attached” coronavirus relief aid meant to cover shortfalls and expenses during the pandemic...Author: Debbie Cenziper, Joel Jacobs, Shawn Mulcahy, The Washington Post
NEVER give out your Medicare ID to a caller you do not know warns Medicare and the Oregon Attorney General.
Watch Out for Imposter Contact Tracers!
Link above takes you to Oregon Attorney General’s post about how to protect yourself from this scam.This is a short 3 minute NPR feature on advance directives, the document one may use to direct others about the way in which one wishes to be treated during last days. This may be especially important in preventing administration of treatments that come with well-known potential harmful side-effects. 
While it may seem automatic to want assistance with breathing should one need it, there are risks with this particular type of assistance that is causing some to change their documents to specifically prohibit intubation. So what is intubation? This article gives some insight into the high-stakes risks and harms that are possible from this treatment.Fearful of Covid-19, Older People are Changing Their Living Wills
by Judith Graham
published May 9, 2020
in The Washington Post
Last month, Minna Buck revised a document specifying her wishes should she become critically ill.“No intubation,” she wrote in large letters on the form, making sure to include the date and her initials.Buck, 91, had been following the news about covid-19. She knew her chances of surviving a serious bout of the illness were slim. And she wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be put on a ventilator under any circumstances.“I don’t want to put everybody through the anguish,” said Buck, who lives in a continuing care retirement community in Denver.For older adults contemplating what might happen to them during this pandemic, ventilators are a fraught symbol, representing a terrifying lack of personal control as well as the fearsome power of technology.With more people dying at home than in hospitals, pickup and delivery cremation services are popping up. Do your due diligence. Here is one such company featured in this Willamette Week article by Elise Herron published July 9, 2019:SOLACE CREMATION Is Digitizing, and Streamlining, the Rituals of DeathIn less than five minutes, customers can arrange to have their loved one’s remains picked up and transported to a local crematorium—and within a week, the ashes are delivered to their door in a sleek, rectangular urn the size and shape of an iPhone box. (Continued here…)
Image from Solace Cremation
Eugene Brown at his home. SOURCE: TEHAMA COUNTY PUBLIC GUARDIAN
(Spoiler: the money went to someone who thought he was already dead!)The Mystery of the Millionaire Hermit
by Claire Martin for Bloomberg BusinessOn the afternoon of Aug. 22, 2015, Dale Tisserand and Melani Rodrigue opened the front door to a small white house in Corning, Calif., a town of 7,500 about 115 miles north of Sacramento. The women, who’d been given the keys by local police, are investigators for the office of the Tehama County Public Administrator. They knew the owner had died in the house the previous week and that his name was Eugene Brown.The neighborhood mail carrier was the one who’d called the police. Every day, Brown would wait for her in a chair by his door, and the two would exchange pleasantries. But for the past five days, there’d been no sign of him. Police did a welfare check and discovered his body in a pool of dried blood by the toilet. Members of the coroner’s office who were dispatched to the house determined that he died of a stroke, but not before breaking his nose in a nasty fall. They did a quick search for a will and contact information for family members and friends—return addresses on envelopes, phone numbers jotted on scraps of paper. Not finding anything, they called (Bloomberg article continued here)
Before dying of brain cancer at age 56, Jacqueline Zinn wrote letters to each of her children, including daughter Mary Kathryn. (Doug Zinn)
Contributing writer - Washington Post
My friend Jacqueline Zinn was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a brain cancer, in 2013; she died 18 months later, at age 56, leaving behind a husband and four kids. Jacquie was a triathlete who knew a thing or two about endurance, and she managed her treatment — surgery, radiation and chemotherapy... Washington Post article continued here…For so many, Social Security is the safety net they just cannot live without.But knowing when to collect your benefits and understanding the system’s complex rules can be very vexing.In a poll earlier this year conducted for MassMutual, nearly half of respondents ages 50 and over failed a... Washington Post article continued here…
(Matt Rourke/AP Photo)
Only one-third of Americans older than 65 have living wills. That's according to a survey published last year in the journal Health Affairs. Not surprisingly, younger people are even less likely to have made preparations for their death. One woman in Los Angeles has made it her business to help people get their affairs in order.Every month or so, 49-year-old Amy Pickard hosts a potluck gathering at her apartment."They've been described as death Tupperware parties," she explains. Guests bring food that reminds them of a deceased loved one. Continued…