Long Term Care

As in almost all aspects of our lives, artificial intelligence (AI) is seeping into the health care arena, including long term care for older people, either at home or in facilities. In hospitals, you’re beginning to see robots deliver pills or lunch trays and transport specimens to labs. And of…

If you or a loved one has been hospitalized in recent years, you’ve probably had this experience: You’ve barely put on the hospital gown when a “discharge planner” starts the conversation about where you’ll go once the hospital decides you should leave. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to start…

Take one older relative in need of assistance. Add in several adult children and grandchildren, all of whom live in different parts of the country. Mix in some unexpected health problems…and what do you have? A potentially volatile situation, as everyone struggles to figure out their roles and responsibilities. Tensions…

If you’ve been involved in the care of someone with dementia, you’ve probably faced this moment of truth: Should you always be brutally honest, no matter how hurtful that seems or how little you may be understood, or do you tell a “white lie” or create a deception in the…

While you can feel enormous satisfaction from being a family caregiver, the burdens and sacrifices are real and substantial. A recent seminal report from AARP makes clear that the challenges faced by today’s family caregivers are growing more complicated. The report, Home Alone Revisited: Family Members Providing Complex Care, details…

Face it: If you’re like most people, when you hear the term “dementia,” you most likely assume the conversation is about Alzheimer’s. But in fact there are a lot of other causes of dementia, some having little to do with the sort of brain plaques and tangles that come from…