No one likes growing old. The most common phrase my elderly patients tell me is, “it sucks getting old,” and I believe them. It is one thing after another.
For doctors who treat elderly, many different issues are important to discuss including how well you function with simple activities of daily living. A patient is either highly independent or very dependent based on how well they bathe, dress, toilet, transfer, or feed them selves.
Not only are activities of daily living important to assess, we need to know how your hearing is, how well your balance is, your cognition, in fact, we need a team of professionals to adequately evaluate an elderly person, including social worker, nutritionist, physical and occupational therapists.
Doctors can and should do a general physical exam on elderly to evaluate nutritional status, balance, hearing, etc.
The social worker evaluates suitable living arrangements whether in a family’s home or in a skilled nursing facility. The social worker is very important in attending to many of the needs of the family as they make hard decisions for their elder parents.
Physical and Occupational therapists are specially trained in evaluating the functional limits of elderly people. They evaluate how well the range of motion is on all extremities, flexibility, strength, ability to walk, etc. They are super important for evaluating for any disability, and provide recommendations for proper management of those disabilities.
Balance and fall prevention is an important evaluation of elderly, as falls are number one cause for hospitalization in people over age 75.
Polypharmacy, osteoporosis, dementia, and depression are all issues that doctors try to evaluate. Sometimes appropriate elderly evaluation takes more than one visit.
If you can get these evaluations done over 2 or 3 visits, the doctor will have a good idea of assisting you in the “golden years.”
Thanks for the questions and feel free to email me at runsinthewynd@gmail.com
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