Stories & Tips

Judy’s Video Tips (click)

Judy’s Radio Broadcasts (click)

Judy’s Written Stories (click)

Recommended Resources (click)

 

See below for the latest posts on any topic:

How Germany is Handling Their Senior Care Shortage?

Date: August 26, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
How Germany is Handling Their Senior Care Shortage?

We’ve been talking a lot about how New Hampshire is facing a senior care shortage due to the “Silver Tsunami.” This is when all the Baby Boomers will start be old enough to need senior care.

Germany is facing that same shortage, but how are they handling it?

How Germany is Handling Their Senior Care Shortage?

How Germany is Handling Their Senior Care Shortage?

 

Germany has almost 3 million seniors needing care across the country. By 2060, that number is supposed to grow to 4.5 million.

Because this problem has been pointed out, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has visited several communities to see what daily life is like for both the residents and the workers.

Needing New Workers

 

Like with NH, part of the senior care shortage is due to lack of younger workers. At the moment, thousands of care communities are understaffed. Some communities don’t even announce job openings because finding applicants is so hard.

Last year it took 171 days on average to fill a position in senior care. Of course this difficulty depends on the area of the country, but overall it’s hard to get young people interested in caregiving.

Another part of the problem is that carers have low wages. They often make less an hour than all other jobs. This puts off people, especially young people, because they need funds to start their life.

How Germany is Tackling These Problems

Due to all these problems, a joint effort by Germany’s health, family, and labor ministers are now working together with the hope of filling 13,000 positions in their first push.

They also have a Concerted Action Care plan that focuses on 5 things:

1. Improved training programs

2. Better working conditions

3. Digitalization

4. Recruitment from abroad

5. Changing Salaries

Hopefully, this plan will help lessen the burden on Germany’s elderly population and help exhausted workers.

Read more here.

3 Ways to Approach a Senior’s Eating Habits

Date: August 26, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
3 Ways to Approach a Senior's Eating Habits

We’ve already talked about eating disorders affecting seniors, but it’s good to talk about eating habits in general. As mentioned before, eating disorders and eating problems are not the same thing, even if they have the same end result. Here are 3 ways to approach a senior’s eating habits.

3 Ways to Approach a Senior's Eating Habits

3 Ways to Approach a Senior’s Eating Habits

 

Sometimes, approaching your beloved senior about their eating habits can be hard. Consider these 3 tips from experts.

1. Don’t Jump to Conclusions

It’s important to not assume that a senior is experiencing an eating disorder if they aren’t eating a lot. Sometimes when they are struggling to eat, it could have a underlying medical cause.

Medication side effects, dull taste buds, physical limitations, economic barriers, dementia, and depression all make eating harder.

Some adults also naturally eat less as they become less active, which can be a healthy and an effective weight maintenance strategy.

Also, don’t assume that overweight seniors can’t have eating disorders or nutrition problems.

2. Approach with Care

The best way to figure out the reason for the weight loss is to go to the source. Join the person for a meal and observe potential barriers. This will give you a lot of ideas on what is happening.

They could have a hard time prepping food, disinterest in eating, or fear of being overweight.

Remember that some older adults may be too proud to admit that they don’t have the money or energy to go grocery shopping.

3. Remember That Treatment is Available and Works

Depending on the cause of weight loss, you can teach older adults strategies that can help them. For example, if food doesn’t taste as good as it used to, try playing with different spices. This can make food tasty again.

Some older adults don’t eat well because they are depressed or have dementia. Treating those conditions can lead to improved eating patterns.

If access is the problem, meal delivery services can step in. If physical cooking is more difficult, switching to more premade foods or investing in special tools or other equipment can help.

If it is an eating disorder, get help from a mental health professional through a referral from a primary care doctor or the National Eating Disorders Association.

Treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy can be good for all ages. It can help them learn that their conditions are illnesses, not characters flaws and shift how they view their bodies.

Education about the human body is key too. Many women don’t know that belly fat that tends to emerge around menopause is a protective adaption that helps replace some of the estrogen they are losing.

Read more here.

What’s Good About Growing Old

Date: August 19, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
Your Attitude Affects Your Health as You Age

What’s good about growing old? Well, a University of Illinois study found that older air traffic controllers excelled at their cognitively taxing jobs. Despite the fact that they had losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing. This means that while older minds may have trouble with mental skills, they can gain more abilities in other areas.

What's Good About Growing Old

What’s Good About Growing Old

 

Older people also learned how to deal with social conflicts better. For a 2010 study, researchers at the University of Michigan presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200 people and asked for their advice.

Subjects in their 60s were better at picturing different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions, and suggesting compromises.

Older people handle losses better than younger people as well. They also are happier, less angry, and have less stress.

Read more about these studies here.

8 Ways to Preserve Your Family Memories

Date: August 19, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
8 Ways to Preserve Your Family Memories

Do you have a ton of family memories that are just lying around? Is it making you feel kind of bad? There’s a reason why it makes you feel bad, preserving memories are important for the past, present, and future generations. Here are 8 ways to preserve family memories.

8 Ways to Preserve Your Family Memories

8 Ways to Preserve Your Family Memories

 

It can be overwhelming to start a preservation project. See what works for you.

 

1.  Old Home Movies

These are the most urgent memories to preserve. They are deteriorating everyday. You start to lose the color in them. Services like LegacyBox make it easy to save them.

An added bonus of digitizing these old movies is that they can be turned into framable stills, which can then be framed pictures.

2. Don’t Take Apart Old Photo Albums

If you take apart an album, you’ve lost the context of the photos. Instead, you take a piece of unbleached muslin and one that has not been treated with fabric softeners. Wrap the album up to keep all the loose pieces together and store it in an acid free box.

If you have loose photos, you can store them in individual polypropylene sleeves, including a piece of acid free paper. This is so you can put all the info about the moment in time of the picture.

3. Back Up Images On Cloud Services

Photos and documents, like hospital records or old letters, can be shared through the internet. You can use services like Dropbox or Google Drive.

You don’t need a fancy scanner to upload your old photos. Google PhotoScan is a free app that works on your smartphone.

If there are too many for just you alone, try setting up a family reunion where everyone helps you. This gives people the chance share stories.

4. Younger Relatives Can Interview Older Ones

They can have amazing stories that will be lost if they aren’t recorded. Younger relatives will have never heard these stories and may have questions that no one else would think of asking.

5. Store Hard Copies Carefully

Make sure photos and documents are off the floor and out of basements or attics. They should also be away from vents and rooms that share an outside wall where temperature or moisture fluctuations can cause damage.

6. Tie In Contemporary Photos on Social Media to Your Family Archives

It’s so easy to drag and drop hundreds of digital photos to the cloud, and it leaves a trail for family to discover one day. You can have a word doc in each file that explains the situations around the photos.

7. Tell Your Family Heirloom’s Stories

People may not know how important items are and throw them away. People in the future should know why heirlooms are so important. Write down their history.

You can create an album with photos and notes about each of the heirlooms.

8. Contact Your Local Historical Society

If none of these options are good for you, try contacting your local historical society to see if they want your family’s items.

Read more here.

Criminals Steal $37 Billion from America’s Seniors

Date: August 19, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
Wells Fargo Bank Branch Manager Admits to Stealing from Seniors

Around 5 million seniors are targeted by scammers. They’re stealing from America’s seniors to the point of $37 billion a year. They can also be targeted by relatives that want to take advantage of them as well. The number of victims is increasing as baby boomers retire and their ability to manage trillions of dollars in personal assets diminish.

Criminals Steal $37 Billion from America's Seniors

Stealing from America’s Seniors

 

For every case of theft that is reported to authorities, there can be as many as 44 that are not.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought attention to elder exploitation as a public health problem in a 2016 report. The report cites research done by Mark Lachs. He did this research 20 years ago.

He is now co-chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He says that elder abuse victims, including financial exploitation, die 3 times faster than those who haven’t been abused.

How It Can Happen

 

In many cases, it can seem like the victim gave consent, but that is due to manipulation or deception. Seniors that are targeted the most are ones diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

This is because it takes longer to sort out what is truth and what is false. It also causes the senior a lot emotional distress because they are constantly questioning themselves.

The key to getting these cases solved is proving incapacity. Anyone can give money to whoever they want, but when they have cognitive impairments, they may no longer have the ability to judge whether that’s a good idea or not. They might not even understand the consequences of what they’ve done.

Not Enough Funding to Solve Cases

 

The biggest hurtle right now is getting funding for institutions who are trying to prevent senior exploitation. The Elder Justice Act, which is the first comprehensive legislation to address elder abuse, was enacted in 2010.

Only, it wasn’t funded until 2015, even then, it was only given $4 million. It was supposed be closer to $1 billion.

Though things are getting better. In February 2018, the Justice Department announced “the largest coordinated sweep of elder fraud cases in history.” They charged more than 250 defendants with schemes that caused 1 million elderly Americans to lose more than $500 million. This is part of the ongoing effort to stop people from stealing from America’s seniors.

Read more here.

6 Types of Drugs Older Adults Should Avoid or Limit

Date: August 11, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
Government are Warning About a Drug Being Pushed on the Elderly

Medication is such an important aspect to our health, especially for seniors. They can also be extremely dangerous to health as well. Medication errors are one of the top reasons that seniors are sent to the hospital. Here are 6 types of drugs older adults should avoid.

6 Types of Drugs Older Adults Should Avoid

Why Medication Can Be So Hard to Prescribe

 

Prescribing medications for people who are 65 and older can be hard. They can cause more side effects in older people than in younger. As your body gets older, it takes in medication differently.

It’s even harder because now there are only 7,500 physicians in America that specialize in older adults. This statistic is by the American Geriatrics Society. There are 46 million Americans that are seniors. This equates to around 6,100 patients per doctor.

This will only get worse. The senior population is going to grow more and more.

6 Types of Drugs Older Adults Should Avoid

 

There are 6 classes of medications that can be a problem for older adults.

1. Benzodiazepines:

These are often over prescribed for anxiety and sleep disorders. Some drugs in this class are diazepam (Valium), lorazepam (Ativan), alpraxolam (Xanax), and chlordiazepoxide (Librium.) These medications can cause confusion and increase the risk of falling.

2. Non-Benzodiazepines:

These are prescribed for insomnia. Look out for Zolpidem (Ambien), zaleplon (Sonata), and eszopiclone (Lunesta.) These are highly addictive and can cause odd sleep behaviors like sleepwalking.

3. Anticholinergics:

Drugs in this class are diphenhydramine (Benadryl), acetaminophen with diphenhydramine (Tylenol PM), and some muscle relaxers that have diphenhydramine (an antihistamine.) These can cause confusion, constipation, dry mouth, blurry vision, or urine retention in older adults. Too much exposure to these drugs can lead to dementia.

4. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs:

These drugs are not recommended for long term use. Ibuprofen (Motrin), naproxen (Aleeve), aspirin, and other drugs in this class are tough on kidneys. They also increase the possibility of stomach bleeding. If you need help managing pain for arthritis, try Tylenol, physical therapy, acupuncture, aquatic therapy, or acupressure.

5. Antipsychotics:

These drugs are used to help treat serious mental heath conditions. The problem is that they are often overprescribed for mild agitation, anxiety, or depression. If you have to take them, start with the lowest dosage.

6. Old drugs:

Barbiturates aren’t really prescribed anymore, but these sedatives are still available and highly addictive both physically and psychologically.

Blood pressure medications can also cause fatigue or lead to falls.

Remember to never hide anything from your doctor and keep a updated medication and allergy list.

Read more about these drugs here.

Weight Loss in the Elderly Could Hurt Bone Strength

Date: August 11, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
Weight Loss in the Elderly Could Hurt Bone Strength

We talk about a lot about health and how to stay healthy here. Weight loss is usually a good thing and a way to stay healthy. But, now researchers claim that it could reduce bone density, bone architecture, and elderly bone strength.

Weight Loss in the Elderly Could Hurt Bone Strength

The Study About Elderly Bone Strength

 

The study was published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. It included 769 women and 595 men with an average age of 70.

The study says that the huge changes to the skeleton in bodies that lost a lot of weight were clinically significant. This translated into an almost 3 times higher risk of fracture for those who lost 5% or more weight over 40 years.

Long term and recent weight loss were found to be connected with lower cortical density and thickness. There was also higher cortical porosity and lower trabecular density.

“We showed that men and women with both shorter term weight loss over 4-6 years and longer term weight loss over 40 years had more micro-architectural deterioration of their bones than persons who did not lose weight,” says principal investigator Douglas P. Kiel from the Hebrew Seniorlife Institute for Aging Research, US.

Further work needs to be done to see if these bone deficits can be prevented through interventions or therapy.

Read more here.

7 Exercises That People Over 50 Shouldn’t Do

Date: August 11, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
7 Exercises That People Over 50 Shouldn't Do

As we get older, we have to update how we work out and exercise. If you do the same things that you did at 30 when you’re 50, it’s going to hurt. Our bodies change as we get older. Here are seven exercises that people over 50 shouldn’t do.

7 Exercises That People Over 50 Shouldn't Do

7 Exercises That People Over 50 Shouldn’t Do

There are some exercises that you should just skip altogether.

1. Leg Extension Machine

This type of exercise involves extending the legs up out in front of you with resistance in front of your ankles while in a seated position. It focuses the quadriceps in the front of the thighs.

This can put unnecessary stress over the knee cap, causing wear and tear.

Instead, do multidirectional lunges or squats with close attention to form.

2. Back Extension on a Roman Chair

The Roman chair back-strengthening exercise involves bending forward from the waist with your thighs supported. You use your lower back muscles to pull yourself back up.

If you have any lower back problems, it can be painful.

Try planks or quadrupeds for core strength.

3. Pull Downs or Pull Ups Behind the Head

These exercises work the back and biceps. It involves pulling a bar behind the head. You need to lean down and pull a bar behind your neck. In pull ups, you lift yourself up to a stationary position, and the bar is also behind your neck.

It puts an unnecessary amount of stress on the front of your shoulder, which could lead to injuries.

Try instead to do pull ups and pull downs in front of your head instead of behind.

4. Plyometric Exercises

Also known as jump training, this involves explosive movement like box jumps and depth jumps. These have been popularized by CrossFit.

These are great for adding strength and power, but it can be dangerous if not done correctly. It can put a lot of stress on body parts and joints.

You can still do these types of exercises, stick to doing it once a week. Also, make sure to be under the watchful eye of a professional.

5. Overhead Presses

Lifting weights straight overhead like in a military press or dumbbell press puts a lot of stress across the shoulders and rotator cuff tendons.

Rotator cuff injuries are the most common after age 60.

Instead, try lateral shoulder raises or front raises.

6. Heavy Weights

Lifting weights is a great way to build strength, but it can be more dangerous as we get older. There’s no reason to go for the heavy weights.

You should aim for a weight where you can get ten reps, where the last couple reps are challenging.

7. Sprinting

While it’s a good idea to increase your workout intensity periodically, it can put you at a bigger risk of injury.

The faster you go, the bigger the risk that you can get injured.

It’s best to take it slow and steady. Also, make sure to warm up first.

Read more here.

8 Must Haves for a Healthy Pantry

Date: August 5, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
8 Must Haves for a Healthy Pantry

Eating healthy is so important. We’ve discussed this over and over again. It’s a lot easier to do this when you have a pantry with healthy ingredients. Here are 8 musts haves for a healthy pantry.

8 Must Haves for a Healthy Pantry

8 Must Haves for a Healthy Pantry

 

These are 8 basic staples that should help you eat and stay healthy.

1.  Low Salt Stock

The secret to great Vietnamese pho, or any soup for that matter, is a good stock. But stock is also a great way to reheat cooked grains or steam fresh vegetables without fat.

Stock boosts the flavors in sauces. If you don’t have time to cook, use good quality low salt canned vegetable, chicken, or beef broths.

2. Olive Oil

The unsaturated fats found in vegetable oils like olive oil or canola are good for you and your heart.

Try to keep at least one type of vegetable oil around to be used in the kitchen. You can saute with it, make vinaigrettes, or drizzle it over toast.

3. Vinegar

A splash of an acid ingredient, like vinegar or lemon juice, added at the end of cooking can help perk up or balance out flavors in a dish.

You would be surprised at the health benefits vinegar has.

4. Mustard

Mustard is a super healthy condiment. It’s fat free, low calorie, and has huge flavor punch that gives it almost unlimited versatility in the kitchen.

Grainy mustard is the best.

5. Whole Grains

If the bran or germ aren’t removed through milling and processing, grains are much better sources of fiber and nutrients needed for good health.

You can use whole grains that cook quickly like bulgur or roll oats, or you could try precooked packages.

6. Fresh Onions

Not only are onions are healthy for you, but they’re one of those vegetables that are dubbed an aromatic. This means that onions give off great aromas and flavors when cooked in oil.

7. Dried Beans or Lentils

Beans, no matter what kind, are the cheapest and healthiest staples that will be in your pantry.

Studies show that beans can reduce the risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers. They are also protein and fiber rich.

8. Nuts and Seeds

Nuts and seeds are good protein and fiber rich snacks. They are also good for ingredients. They can be used to thicken sauces, they add flavor and a touch of luxury to pilafs, stir-fries, and desserts.

Read more here.

Stretching Improves Muscles in Seniors

Date: August 5, 2018
Author: Erynn
Categories: Stories & Tips
Stretching Improves Muscles in Seniors

Even though we know the benefits of exercise, it can be hard for seniors to participate. Especially if the seniors have mobility problems. In exercising programs, everything starts with stretching your muscles. A recent paper in The Journal of Physiology proved that stretching improves muscles in seniors.

Stretching Improves Muscles in Seniors

The Power of Stretching

 

Many people may not realize how stretching can help our bodies. We think it’s simple way to loosen up our bodies. But to those with weak muscles or mobility issues, stretching is the only exercise they can do, and not get any injuries

Stretching Improves Muscles in Seniors

 

Researchers from Florida State University, Kansas State University, and University of Electro-communications in Tokyo found that regular muscular stretching increased blood flow to muscles of the lower leg. This was done 5 times a week, for a month.

In addition, it was discovered that regular stretching improves the function of arteries in the lower leg. It also increased the number of capillaries within stretched muscles.

To get these results, they placed splints on the lower limbs of aged rats, so the calf muscles were stretched. The splints were on for 30 minutes a day, for 5 days, during a month.

They compared blood flow, arterial function, and the number of capillaries in the muscles of the stretched limb to the other unstretched limb.

What Does This Mean for Seniors?

 

What this study shows is that even seniors who have problems walking or have muscle pain are able to do exercise that benefits them. It can be a slow, low stress regiment and will still see results. This could even help seniors who have peripheral artery disease, or foot or leg problems related to conditions like diabetes, be able to use stretching to regain ability to walk.

Read more here.