by CathyG | Oct 22, 2014 | pollyanna views of aging
Life’s “Common Core:” Ten requirements for teens that won’t get them into college but will make them better people, by Kristin van Ogtrop, was first published in Time Magazine and then reprinted in several places.
The #7 item reads: “Write a heartfelt thank-you note to someone over the age of 70. Even if this person hasn’t given you a holiday or birthday present, find something to thank them for.”
Are 70-year-olds just waiting around for a thank you note from a strange teen or young adult? This idea is SO insulting.
Like many people, Kristin van Ogtrop patronizes 70-year-olds as cute little people who need help. Why thank someone for something they didn’t do?
Better have the kids return to #6 and head to their local animal shelter to offer help. Or find a neighbor of any age who needs a dogwalker.
Actually this whole article is filled with silly assumptions. The #10 suggestion suggests that if you’ll race to the top you’ll knock people out of their way. Some do, some don’t.
And while a few 70-year-olds might welcome a thank you letter (I can’t imagine what the content might look like) I bet the vast majority will want to shove that letter up someplace the sun don’t shine.
by CathyG | Oct 13, 2014 | dying with dignity
The decision to die is a matter of values, not mental illness.
When conversations get difficult, or patients don’t do as they’re told, all too often the medical doctors turn to “psych consults.” A friend who’s married to a psychiatrist told me the hospital now tells “mental health professionals” to find patients incompetent when their decisions go against the hospital’s bottom line.
Psychiatrists can assess physiological components of mental illness; psychologists and some psychiatrists can help people change their thinking and behavior to become happier and enjoy smoother lives.
But what if your only option is living in “assisted care” with minimum-wage uncaring attendants, where you can be tied to a wheel chair in diapers and placed in front of a television for hours at a time, with tasteless food and frequent needle pricks for tests that don’t affect your longevity or well-being?
That’s the common nursing home experience and it doesn’t take a psychologist to see that a wish to die is completely rational.
A professional who diagnoses depression in this circumstance should be tied to a chair in front of a television set tuned to soap operas, wearing diapers, for at least 4 hours. Don’t tell him when you’ll be back. If he complains, say patronizingly, “Oh, are we feeling upset today?” and tell him he can’t have dessert after lunch. Throw in a few needle sticks and see how he feels at the end of the day.
by CathyG | Sep 15, 2014 | single life, stereotypes of aging
In an article about seniors who show up malnourished in emergency rooms, NYT author Judith Graham suggests social isolation might be a factor.
“Who likes to eat alone?” she asks rhetorically.
More and more of us live in one-person households by choice. Some people like to eat alone and it’s time everyone realized that’s a perfectly appropriate choice to make.
If a room is filled with noisy conversation I won’t eat, period. Stress isn’t good for digestion and anyway I want to enjoy my food.
When you like living alone (and census data shows more and more of us do), you obviously like eating alone. We don’t need stigmatizing comments or rhetorical questions with an agenda.
by CathyG | Sep 14, 2014 | pollyanna views of aging
I’m SO sick of those cheery posts “What’s good about getting old.”
If it were REALLY so good, would we have to keep making the point? You don’t see anyone writing about, “It’s great to be a man,” or even, “It’s great to be a woman.” Nor does anyone write, “It’s great to be black,” or, “Why I like being gay.”
Like this one from a mom blog:
There are so many good things about getting older:
1. You stop trying to impress people
2. You see things more clearly
3. Others tolerate your idiosyncrasies
When you stop trying to impress people, you’re giving up. You’re saying you’re not going to advance socially or professionally, so why bother?
Then again, I’ve never worried too much about impressing people with my wardrobe. When I was attending an academic conference several years ago, one guy came up to me to say, “You don’t care, do you? You’re wearing shorts to the opening event!” I hadn’t thought about it, frankly.
Seeing things more clearly can be painful. I shudder when I read a news article about anything medical. It’s usually wildly inaccurate. Anyway, what’s the good of seeing clearly if you aren’t taken seriously because you’re “too old?”
Finally, the reason people “tolerate your idiosyncrasies” is that they’ve bought into the stereotypes of aging. I’ve had my idiosyncracies for a years. People just thought I was weird. In fact, I discovered that one colleague who wrote reference letters for me (reference letters remain a quaint custom in academic job hunting) began each letter with, “Cathy may be somewhat eccentric, but …”
Now when I do something out of the norm, people assume it’s due to age. Sorry, folks: I was a maverick before I knew what it meant.
They think it’s “normal” when you lose thing or bump into walls.
Anyway, everybody ages differently.
Recently a young woman came up to me in the locker room at my gym, right after zumba. She said, “You are amazing! I want to be like you when I’m your age.” Thankfully she was about 20 years off when she guessed my age.
So on the one hand, I showed off a little. I told her my secret: work out 3-4x a week religiously and stay away from doctors.
But on the other hand, there area lots of women as fit as I am or more. What about that 90-year-old who ran marathons? If I did more age-appropriate things I’d be surrounded by women who were equally fit. But I like zumba.
by CathyG | Sep 9, 2014 | medical care
“Nearly 70% of lung cancer occurs in the Medicare population.” That’s the scare statistic the authors of this article use to incite fear and indignation: “Oh no, they’re killing Granny.”
The statistic is probably accurate. But some of these people are in their 80s and 90s. Lung cancer screening makes sense, at best, till age 74. Some elderly folks have other medical conditions that would preclude treatment, regardless of screening outcomes. And when you’re in your 80s and 90s, you could be treated for lung cancer only to end up with some form of cognitive impairment and/or incarceration (I use that word advisedly) in a nursing home with a loss of dignity and independence.
The article reports, “From 2002 to 2010, the NLST evaluated the impact of low-dose computed tomography—or CT—scans in more than 53,000 individuals and demonstrated a 20% reduction in lung-cancer mortality.”
That number is meaningless. We need to know the number of survivors in the screened group vs the number in the non-screened group. If these groups are self-selected the results will be muddled even further because there are differences in people who successfully seek screening vs. those who don’t seek screening or don’t have access.
It’s hard to trust any screening recommendations from radiologists and cancer centers, who stand to profit from screening and from investigating false positive. Here are links to published research studies showing far less impressive results. If newer research is available, let’s see the links.
“Cumulative lung cancer incidence rates through 13 years of follow-up were 20.1 per 10,000 person-years in the intervention group and 19.2 per 10,000 person-years in the usual care group (rate ratio [RR] …” In other words, intervention – presumably this screening – saved less than one person-year.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031728
“Overdiagnosis is of particular concern in lung cancer screening because newer screening modalities can identify small nodules of unknown clinical significance. Previously published analyses of data from the Mayo Lung Project, a large randomized controlled trial conducted among 9211 male cigarette smokers in the 1970s and early 1980s indicated that overdiagnosis might exist in lung cancer screening…”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16757699
Let’s forget about lung cancer screening and use the money for massage.
