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In Search of Technology that Improves Geriatric Care

What Caregivers Say is Hardest About Helping Aging Parents, and Atul Gawande’s Insights in Being Mortal

Several weeks ago, I asked my caregiving audience at Geriatrics for Caregivers a question:

“What’s your biggest frustration with helping aging parents, or aging loved ones?”

The answers were enlightening. Nobody, unsurprisingly, said avoiding delirium, or minimizing medication side-effects, or any of the other very important things we talk about in geriatrics.

Instead, the biggest frustrations overwhelming had to do with managing relationships, and finding ways to provide help and support, while respecting the older person’s desire for autonomy and independence.

(Want to see just what people said is hard? I highly recommend you read their quotes here.)

So, I had a real “Aha!” moment when I read Atul Gawande’s new book, “Being Mortal,” shortly after hearing from the Geriatrics for Caregivers readers.
It turns out that “Being Mortal” is mostly about getting old, and about caring for those who are getting old. 
In other words, he has brought his signature style to the topics of aging, and caregiving.
But you could easily not know this if you’ve mainly read the press about the book. The media has mainly focused on this book being about “end of life,” and Gawande himself chose to highlight a cancer-and-the-magic-of-hospice story in his widely read New York Times op-ed. 
He also, when I saw him speak in San Francisco last month, chose to deliver his prepared remarks on the same topic: the better cancer death of his daughter’s piano teacher.
This struck me as a shame. Although as a society we certainly need to have more conversations about how we die, and how to make it better, we really need to have more conversations about aging, declines in independence, and caregiving.
(Full disclosure: My father died of cancer at age 61, while I was in medical school, and we certainly could have used more palliative care involvement. Rest assured that I consider terminal cancer a devastating experience well worth any and all improvement efforts. But I still think cancer and death are hogging the limelight.)

As far as I can tell, people would rather plan to die than plan to be old and slowly declining.

And I am pretty sure that right now people would rather train in palliative care than in geriatrics.

So. We need people to champion and spearhead a thoughtful discussion about what’s hard about helping older people, especially when they become frail and start to need more assistance. 
And we need good, compelling, readable books that can help people reframe how they might offer help to an aging parent, and what kinds of goals to strive for during those last years. 
I personally think Being Mortal is one of those books: a compelling read that could give families throughout the country some really valuable insights on how to help aging relatives during the last few years.

But in the end it will come down to what the family caregivers think, not me.

(I’ve already had one person tell me she thinks it’s “good for doctors.” Which it surely is, but I’m especially eager to find books that are good for families.)
At some point, I’d like to write a more in-depth summary of the many insights Being Mortal offers, when it comes to helping people manage aging and declines in independence. But as I’m not sure when I’ll have time to write it, I offer you instead a substitute: my tweets from Atul Gawande’s talk at the Commonwealth Club last month.
If you’ve read Being Mortal: what did you think of its insights on aging and caregiving?
[View the story “Atul Gawande Talks About Being Mortal” on Storify]