I found this article in the New York Times. My mother died of COPD, better known as emphysema. Upon reading this article I naturally wondered if my mother would have stopped smoking had she been told earlier in her life that smoking was aging her lungs prematurely. Having my mother die of COPD caused me to be an advocate in support of any assistance which helps an individual stop smoking. As we get older, our lungs are aging normally and the cigarette smoking speeds up the aging of the lungs. Why cut our lives short? No one deserves to die of COPD and certainly no family deserves to watch their loved one die of any type of lung disease.
New York Times
Reminder to Smokers: Your Lungs Are Aging
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A simple discussion of lung capacity appears to double the rate patients follow a doctor’s advice to quit smoking. (more…)
originally appeared in the NY Times, February 13, 2009
Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.
Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.
A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived. (more…)
This is a video of Dr. Marion Somers. Her website is: http://www.drmarion.com/ . This short and informative video gives you some great information on hiring a home care aide. What I want to do is take you one step further and say that hiring an aide for in home care for you or your loved one involves a lot more than just checking a person’s references. There are many families who think that by hiring a home care aide themselves they are saving money and this is correct but at what cost? In order to hire an aide I suggest that not only should you check references but a background check should be run which includes checking their driving history. A home care agency or home health care agency charge more per hour, but with good reason. Here are a few of the reasons: (more…)
This brief report, which originally aired on KOAT in Albuquerque, talks about the results of a study conducted in the Netherlands related to the use of testosterone to slow or reverse the signs of aging in older men.
Technology: Helping Seniors Stay Home Longer As the baby boomer generation ages and the amount of healthcare workers to take care of them decreases, experts are looking for solutions. The fine folks over at Carnegie Mellon University have adopted the attitude “Well if we can’t find elderly care workers, we’ll build them!” And that’s exactly what their research team did. Introducing Flo: a personal robotic assistant for the elderly, or Nursebot. The project was tested in a Pittsburgh nursing home, where Flo would help guide people around and would remind them when it was time to eat or when it was appropriate to take their medications. The goal is to have Flo at home, providing assistance for people whose chronic disorders prevent them from living normal lives. (more…)
Get ready for our roving reporters, Sam and Sadie Silver, as they span the globe looking for interesting and fun senior news!
