Category: Archive: May 2023

Digital Interventions for Older Adults Will Create an Alternative to Nursing Homes

Given a choice between care in a family setting and care in a nursing home, most older people prefer to maintain control and independence and choose to remain in their own home. And when it is time to decide among a variety of interventions, most will opt for approaches that are the least expensive, least medicalized, and most consistent with their earlier life. Increasingly, interventions in the environment can provide the assistance needed for older people to live safely at home for much longer than has ever been possible, and new interventions are being developed all the time. Interventions that…

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Living in the Age of Extended Chronic Conditions

Our cultural understanding of the nature of disease is still based on the belief that acute disease is the fundamental culprit that affects most lives. Until around 100 years ago, widespread infectious diseases like smallpox or tuberculosis that could kill people at any age were the primary threat to human health. Today, however, that element, which held true though all the previous millennia of human existence, is no longer dominant. One of the defining conditions of our current existence is our new ability to stave off death, often for years. Infectious and other deadly diseases have been succeeded in importance…

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Interview with the Author: David Dunkelman

Whether it’s a fear of nursing homes, worry about money running out, or the political crisis of the future of Medicaid and Medicare, the uncertainty of aging is on the minds of many Americans. Author of Aging Forward: A New Path for Health, Technology, and Community, David Dunkelman talks us through why we all need to be thinking about this, and how the solutions to our concerns are all around us just waiting to be applied. America now has more older adults than ever before, and it’s a growing concern how society is going to handle care for this…

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Where Are the Old People?

What does “old” mean today? We usually do not perceive the changes in our environment that are lengthening life and the dramatic effects of increased longevity. If we look around for what, in loose talk, we call “old people” who fit the outdated stereotype, we will see a few. If we look around instead for “adults over 70,” we will find a lot more. In 1950, 70 was old. Now, that’s no longer true. So, what does “old” mean today? New Experiences at Older Ages A very accomplished, active 89-year-old friend recently had heart bypass surgery, quickly recovered, and told…

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