Tag: aging
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Music for the Aging Mind
“Music is the healing force of the universe” -Albert Ayler, the late jazz saxophonist Coincidentally or not, on the day after my last post, “Two Zorbas on Aging“, was published, I happened upon a column by Zorba Paster in the Lacrosse, Wisconsin Tribune titled “Patients need help with noisy hospitals,” that discusses a recent study…
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Old Age and Autobiographical Memory
Encountering new research on autobiographical memory is always unsettling. Even if you avoid the frightening findings on Alzheimer’s and other pathological conditions, the unreliability and difficulty of aging memory are humbling. All of the errors of recall that beset the young become more pronounced in the old. A well written and authoritative description of the…
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A New Direction for Geriatric Psychiatry: Wellness
In his farewell address in May as the outgoing president of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Dilip Jeste emphasized the need for a “positive psychiatry of aging.” Until recently, psychiatry has largely conceptualized health and well-being as the absence of illness and symptoms. In Jeste’s view, “quality of life and psychosocial functioning depend less on…
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Two Zorbas on Aging
Summer reading recommendations are a feature of many publications. I have two for readers of Over65. For some reason, I didn’t read the novel Zorba the Greek when I was younger. Nor did I see the popular movie or musical based on the book. Fortunately, our book club chose it recently. In retrospect, perhaps it…
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Honor Thy Mother and Father
The Japanese have the right idea. Their Prime Minister recently announced his government would invest in the development of “nursing care robots” that help older people with everyday tasks. With just over 20% of its people over age 65, Japan has the largest proportion of elders of any country in the world–the corresponding number for…
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Aging, Weight Gain, and Weight Loss
Overweight, obesity, and physical inactivity are smoking’s close cousins in preventable causes of mortality, leading to over 300,000 deaths annually. The societal costs of these conditions* may be as high as $400 billion per year. Therefore, upon reading the May 6 blog post from Sissela Bok and the May 20 post from Steven Schroeder, it…
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Aging, Stereotypes, and Reality
I have heard for many years, informally and in scholarly journals, that ageism reigns in our society, and in particular that employers are biased against older workers. That last point is frequently made by many observers, who can cite a good bit of data showing that those over 50 who have lost jobs in the…
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How can we fix long-term care insurance?
This post extends the discussion of long-term care insurance recently initiated by Kenneth Deitch. The prospective costs for long-term care are a big problem. First, nursing home care is really expensive for those who end up needing it. Second, the prospect of such an expense is likely to prevent people from making the best use…
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The Benefits of Phased Retirement
Until relatively recently, employees in the U.S. typically transitioned directly from full time work to full time retirement. That practice had at least four major drawbacks: Some employees wanted to stop working full time but for financial reasons felt a need to continue earning. Some employees found their work meaningful apart from the income it…
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Regulation of Long-Term Care Insurance in Massachusetts
The time may come when any one of us will need outside help with certain basic activities, referred to collectively as the activities of daily living or ADLs. Long-term care insurance (LTCI) is a resource for covering some or all of the costs of providing the care needed in that unfortunate situation. It is not…