With the specialized character of medicine these days, as in so many other things, we sometimes truly believe that human growth moves from one neat little category to the next.

One day we‘re called infants and the next, we are in early childhood. Then, perhaps pre-pubescence, followed by adolescence and young adulthood. Then we are “working adults,” as opposed to other kinds of adults who are fortunate enough not to have categories of their own. And then, of course, we become “older people” and the “aged” who reside in senior citizen assisted living homes.

It is certainly an interesting perspective to view the normal life-span with. But this kind of one-track thinking tends to give the impression that health problems occur for the individual, almost spontaneously, as soon as he or she leaves one category and enters the next one, but that’s just not so.

Sometimes, a physician or a counselor will superficially predict certain things and the sequence of events may indeed occur much as it is described. We tend to accept those predictions because they are comforting, although we know from our own personal, hard experience that life really never turns out as we expect. Events tend to pile up one upon the other. Other people and the environment itself will trigger some events to occur early and delay or prevent others from occurring at all.

Often an older person becomes the subject of stereotypical ideas of how the elderly are supposed to act. For instance, if we expect someone to deteriorate, we might feed and medicate the person as if deterioration were actually taking place. As a result, the person may actually fulfill the expectation by becoming malnourished. Over-medication is another dangerous bi-product of this kind of behavior. We may anticipate that the aging person will require certain drugs and medicines, so we go ahead and administer them without doing the proper analysis, then witness the very decline we thought would take place, right on schedule.

There are a great many things the elderly of today can do for themselves. It’s important not to look upon the problems of elder health as isolated in any way from health problems affecting the entire life-span because they are not. One’s life evolves within a web of circumstance. Most effective medical care should benefit not only today’s elderly but also today’s children, youth, and young adults who are tomorrow’s elderly.

Assisted living marketing services are provided by 800seniors.com a leading referral
system in the assisted living industry. For more information, please visit seniorlivinglasvegas.org or call 1-800-768-8221. Sky Palma is a freelance staff writer.

Tags: , ,