Taking Care of Aging Family Members - Wendy Lustbader

 

One of the BEST, most clearly written, most lucid books ever written about the realities about taking care of older family & friends is also one of the oldest.  The amazing Wendy Lustbader wrote this waaaaaay back in 1993.  Rang as true back then as it does in its current, revised edition.  Worth every penny!

Wendy writes more as a friend than as an AUTHORITY, which can be comforting when you feel like so much is spinning beyond your control

 

My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine"

Okay, the full title of Dennis McCullough's book is actually  My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine," the Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Loved Ones, but that seems a bit much for a subject line, don't you think?

Confession  - I haven't read this book.  I've only just ordered it.  But it from the reviews I've devoured, didn't want to dawdle in sharing it.  To my thinking, it's the best sort of book on aging, written by someone who gives as much respect & weight to subjective anecdotal information as  objective scientific findings.  

For now, here's the blurb from its Amazon listing, which says in relatively few words the same thing I've read in various reviews:

Thanks to advances in science and medicine, our parents are living longer than ever before. But our health-care system doesn't perform as well when decline eventually sets in. We want to do our best as our loved ones face new complications—more diseases and disabilities—demanding further need for support and careful judgment, but the choices we have to make can seem overwhelming.

Family doctor and geriatrician Dennis McCullough recommends a new approach: Slow Medicine. Shaped by common sense and kindness, it advocates for careful anticipatory "attending" to an elder's changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—thereby improving the quality of elders' extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. This is not a plan for preparing for death; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years.

And from Dr. McCullough's website:

Dennis McCullough, M.D., has been an "in-the-trenches" family physician and geriatrician for 30 years. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. He is a member of the American Geriatrics Society, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, and the American Medical Directors Association, as well as the coauthor of The Little Black Book of Geriatrics. He lives with his wife, the poet Pamela Harrison, in Norwich, VT.