If you can stay calm while others all about you lose their heads, sometimes it means you just don’t understand the problem. Click on document to read the full Department of Justice press release. Most of the time, being reasonable and understanding and putting yourself in the other fellow’s shoes…
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Pono is the 11-year-old son of a college friend and now well-respected physicist, Dr. Brendan Casey. A few months ago, Brendan asked if Pono could speak to me about a Lego Robotics project. Besides vacuuming my son’s Legos by the bagful, I don’t know much about them. Pono and his…
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Would you rather breathe or see? That’s the question put to my mom by her doctor regarding the medication she takes to combat her COPD and breathing problems. Unfortunately, a nasty side effect of her inhaler has caused her to develop glaucoma and she’s now on medicine for that. Hopefully…
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Many older adults take 10 or more prescription drugs daily, often prescribed by several different doctors. Not only can all those pills be difficult to remember and afford, they can have unpleasant side effects and interactions that are magnified in the frail elderly. The most recent issue of the American…
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On Tuesday I discussed a recent upbeat article in the New Old Age blog about a nursing home’s improved approach to the all too widespread problem of medicating the elderly. I also raised questions about why it has taken this long for nursing homes to start addressing this issue when…
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Sometimes I worry that we are not making progress in our goal of improving the health of older Americans. Sometimes, the process of incremental change with its two steps forward, one step back seems more like going nowhere. As I wrote in a recent post, the Foundation has been working…
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Well, not my picture, and not on the cover of the Rolling Stone. But it is on the cover of Pharmacy Today, and it is a picture of long-time Foundation grantee June Simmons, MSW, the CEO of Partners in Care Foundation. June earned this acknowledgement with her 15-year commitment to…
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My 70-year-old dad, Jack, is a kind, generous, loyal man whose trust in a doctor, a nurse, and a broken health care system nearly cost him his life (a few times). For 26 years, my dad was misdiagnosed with asthma by his primary care physician. He was prescribed every…
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At the Foundation, we often feel that information we have about improving the care of older adults is simply not getting the attention it deserves. People see a neighbor hospitalized repeatedly for the same chronic condition (say heart failure, the number one cause of hospital admission for Medicare beneficiaries), and…
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It's a doggone shame to single out man's best friend when we need to address medication management. A recent posting on the WSJ HealthBlog titled "CDC to Americans: Don't Trip Over Your Dog" noted that 1 percent of emergency room visits for falls are pet-related. That's "ruff"-ly 86,000 Americans injured…
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