On September 20, Wang Haidong, director of the Department of Aging of the National Health and Health Commission, said that it is expected that around 2035, the number of elderly people aged 60 and above will exceed 400 million. The dependency ratio and social dependency ratio will reach their peaks one after another, accounting for more than 30% of the total population, entering a stage of severe aging.
In other words, in the future, almost one out of every three people will be an elderly person, which also makes elderly life, elderly diseases and other elderly topics rush into people’s field of vision again.
As modern humans live longer, old age is the third and final stage of life after childhood and adulthood. We are obviously living longer than ever, but we are not necessarily happier and happier.
Modern society tends to metaphorize old age as a disease, a condition of fear, contempt, neglect and denial. Youth and productivity are the sonatas of the times, as we always try to avoid the signs of aging and death.
Many people find that as they get older, the world becomes less patient with themselves, and irrational, abnormal situations are increasingly seen as normal.
If an elderly person is confused and forgetful, people will only think that he is “old and confused”, not used to thinking about the possible disease problem behind the phenomenon, and eventually leads to treatment delay.
A world unfriendly to the elderly, arguably a good world? Know that most of us will eventually grow old, and this world, if we don’t improve it, is the world we’re about to live in.
It’s always been this way, right?
Professor Louise Aronson, a Harvard-trained geriatrician and medical writer, shares her personal recent book, The Silver Generation. The story of a 30-year career in geriatrics, drawing on history, science, literature and popular culture, gives her reflections.
01
The “alienated” old age
When you hear the word “old,” what is the first associated word that comes to your mind? Then when you hear “older”, what word comes to your mind?
This is an annual classroom exercise that a professor at UC Berkeley does with new medical students. Classrooms have changed over the years, but students’ responses to the two words have barely budged.
The words most commonly associated with “old age” were wrinkles, hunched back, slow movement, baldness and gray hair, and many students wrote “weak”, “fragile”, “powerless” “Weakness” “Disease”. Some people used words like “wisdom”, but more chose “sad”, “pejorative”, “stubborn” and “lonely”. Another wrote: “Mothballs and stale smokiness.”
But for “older,” they write very different words. The most common word was “wisdom”, other responses included “respect”, “leadership”, “experience”, “power”, “money” and “knowledge”.
This is how most people, including the elderly themselves, think about old age, and there is a decline in the belief that anything is unavoidable in the process of going from young to old.
And we define “old age” in negative terms precisely because that’s what prevails in our culture.
At present, this view is also widely accepted by the whole world. However, a single and negative assessment of “old age” is necessarily not a complete picture of the actual situation.
This reflects what we’re all missing when we think about the topic of aging. Or, at least, when looking at the last 1/3 of life, people no longer have the same concern, curiosity, creativity, or rigor that they had when looking at the first 2/3.
02
Medical hardships for older adults
Professor Louis Aronson is a geriatrician, educator, and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), her department is ranked among the best in the U.S. for 2021-2022 Top 10 best specialties.
As a leader in geriatric medicine in the United States, she has documented many cases of elderly patients in her book, and through these career observations she has found that the elderly face some medical difficulties.
The condition of the elderly is difficult to judge
Take dementia as an example. Its early stages are subtle and difficult to detect, and only those who are professional or observant will find it.
French author Anne Ernault, describing the months before her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, wrote:
She changed, she started laying the table very early…she became grumpy…she was prone to panic when she got notifications from the pension fund…then it started to keep showing up various situations. She was waiting on the platform for the train that had already passed. When she was about to go out to buy something, she found that all the stores were closed. Her keys were always missing, and she seemed to be guarding against unseen threats.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and, by standard definitions, has a more gradual onset. A few years before diagnosis, patients begin to show symptoms that are difficult to detect at first and are often attributed to age or carelessness.
Dementia can make people angry, depressed, aggressive, or unapproachable. Over a long course of dementia, many patients sometimes experience one or more of these symptoms, and symptoms may persist for many years.
This also makes it easy for us to misjudge the condition of the elderly, and some abnormal aggressive behaviors are actually caused by dementia or the side effects of drugs.
Medical use risks in older adults
When a new drug is launched, there is often a large amount of clinical data for children, but not for the elderly. The needs of the elderly in this regard are always ignored. The medical system defaults that the elderly and adults are the same, but in fact many medicines have completely different effects on the elderly.
Aspirin, for example, is a very common drug that young people take perfectly fine, but as patients age, the risk of taking aspirin increases significantly, which can lead to internal bleeding, hospitalization, and even death.
A 2011 study identified aspirin as one of the top four medications responsible for emergency room visits in people over 65. But these are only known after the death of many elderly people, not clinical data from the beginning.
A healthcare system that does not welcome the elderly
The most notable feature of geriatric medicine is that medical care is more important than treatment, and it is often flexible means, such as nail clipping, skin care, etc., which requires a combination of medical assistance and care. It can effectively improve the quality of life of the elderly.
In the U.S. medical system, for heavy-duty methods such as CT and surgery, because these methods are easier to achieve and more profitable, such heavy-duty methods are still encouraged to a certain extent. The result may be that the elderly are very painful, and the prognosis is not necessarily good.
The clinical pathway approach assumes that patients with the same disease benefit from the same treatment. While this criterion has many benefits, it focuses on a single disease and does not take into account the many interrelated diseases that may be present in a single patient, nor does it take into account the young, old, and very old populations, or those For patients who are otherwise healthy, have long-term illnesses or are dying, the incidence and treatment effects of each disease and each person’s experience are different.
Equally important, as medical scientist and anthropologist Arthur Kellerman points out in “Stories of Sickness”: For patients of all ages, American medical Systems are still often treating disease rather than focusing on pain, which is a unique expression of disease in the human individual.
In the current medical environment, doctors rarely explain to patients how cruel and traumatic these medical procedures are, nor do they show patients what is more appropriate for the patient’s situation. alternative therapy.
Families often assume that doctors will give you the best solution, but in the United States most medical professionals are simply providers of products and contracted services to the health care system. This system will only pay for a certain medical service, possibly even prolonging the suffering, not repairing the health problem.
Reports go so far as to point out that, in most cases, doctors are not even willing to choose similar treatment options for themselves or their loved ones.
Among the reasons for dislike of caring for older patients gathered from clinicians, the moral pressure on physicians to provide older adults with ineffective treatments that lead to to great pain. However, the problem is not just at the doctor level.
Fear and Loneliness in Nursing Homes
Nursing homes have long been hailed as “ideal places to retire,” but Professor Louis Aronson also argues in his booka different view.
As we age, nursing homes, no matter how good the conditions, are one of the greatest fears people have.
Because even as we age, we still want to be in control of our lives and schedules and enjoy the familiar surroundings and pace of life in our own homes. To some extent, nursing homes represent the antithesis of adulthood and freedom, and the social and personal information they contain is mostly negative.
People think that it is no longer safe for the elderly to be alone at home, which means that safety is the primary and often the only consideration, so people send the elderly to nursing homes against their will .
In general, older adults do not choose to live in nursing homes. They just have no choice, and some elderly people live in nursing homes for their children and spouses.
Nursing homes also have something unique compared to other places. As two seniors who move into nursing homes put it in the book: “Why didn’t you move in before you were reminded that you were witnessing so many deaths here?”
In most senior care facilities, an elderly person is admitted to the hospital or died in the room almost every week. Over time, more and more elderly people who were healthy when they moved in became forgetful and used crutches or walkers.
These changes are detrimental to relationships because when a person experiences them, he may isolate himself out of anxiety, powerlessness, or shame. What if long-term stable, meaningful relationships are the key to human happiness, yet you live in a place where people around you are constantly changing, disappearing, and even dying?
There is a final key problem with senior care facilities, and that is that it deprives the elderly and others of the opportunity for intergenerational communication that is an essential life experience.
Living with people from all ages, we can build relationships that inspire learning, anger, innovation, discomfort, frustration, love and creativity—the normal relationship between people.
03
Medical hardships for older adults
When people enter the stage of aging, they are accompanied by the need for dual support for life and emotions. These needs often require people to invest huge costs to achieve, whether it is monetary cost or time cost.
With the development of science and technology and the increase of the average life expectancy of human society, more and more technology companies have also set their sights on this field and have launched some new products to realize these urgent need.
In an ideal world, everyone would enter old age with a kind and competent caregiver to meet our physical, social and emotional needs; in an ideal world, a large number of unemployed Crowds are always matched by huge job openings, but most people don’t live in an ideal world.
In real life, a reliable babysitting robot is much better than an unreliable, rude human caregiver, and much better than the “isolated” status quo of most people .
Nursing is hard work, often tedious, with embarrassing physical contact, exhausting, and emotionally challenging.
Sometimes this work is also dangerous, even disgusting, almost year-round, with no or low pay, and with serious health hazards that we hate in our mouths difficult jobs, are careers that many people are unable to pursue or refuse to choose.
Many countries have realized this and are investing in the robotics industry. In Japan, robots are considered to be synonymous with “healing” and “healing”. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has launched a nursing robot that assists mobile in order to solve the problem of labor shortages and reduce injuries to caregivers.
These robots can assist with movement, handling, and are equipped with emotional expression systems that are not only polite, but even charismatic. There are also social assistance robots that can lead the elderly to exercise, identify the people participating in the exercise, remember their names and say hello one by one.
A team of eight European companies and universities has jointly developed a programmable, touchscreen humanoid “social companion” robot. It can remind and encourage humans to participate in social activities, eat nutrition, and exercise.
Swedish researchers have developed a robot that looks like a standing mirror and a vacuum cleaner to monitor health indicators like blood pressure and exercise, and support virtual doctor visits.
For most people, a robot may indeed meet some physical and functional needs, but it is still essentially a machine, whether it can play and human in our lives Just as important role?
Actually, the answer to this question seems to be getting more and moretends to be certain.
Open the YouTube video site and you can see the old Japanese man with dementia chatting happily with the robot that looks like a baby seal, the old man is smiling, and the robot will talk to him Caress and confide in response. You can also see cute colorful robots that treat children with developmental delays, which can collect all the behavioral information of children.
Walk down the street, sit in a restaurant, or walk into any workplace, and you’re bound to find people engrossed in playing with electronics on their hands or tables.
It is true that some people communicate with other people through electronic products, but the basis of this communication is still human-computer interaction. While there are plenty of skeptics that such exchanges don’t constitute meaningful, emotional relationships, they seem to bring excitement and satisfaction to billions of people.
Over the next 10 years, scientists will optimize existing robotic applications, combining their physical assistance functions with social support functions to meet some of the complex needs of frail elderly people.
It was also stated that the difficulty of the current business is not technology, but how to find a viable business model. After all, people want to have a robot in retirement, but shouldn’t want to spend all their retirement savings on it.
04
Age in moderation
Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle defined the whole as: “It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
He presents this concept through a three-act play, each part comprising a different setting but serving a unique theme. Most people’s lives follow a similar process, from the beginning to the escalation of the plot to the curtain falling.
In pre-modern human history, the average human lifespan was only 30 to 40 years old, so the important drama of life usually ended early in the first act, and it must be before the second act If the curtain ends early, in case of childbirth, accidents, and infections, the life expectancy will be further reduced.
Today, the average life expectancy has doubled. After life is stretched, there are many scenes in each act, and most of us also enter the third act, the old age, which starts at the age of 60 or 70 and lasts for decades.
We eagerly lengthen our old age to make it more meaningful and satisfying, but most do not want the natural, Unpolished visions of passing through their old age.
If we don’t want our old age to become “garbage time” in our lives, we all need to look at the way we’re doing it and why we’re doing it the way we do it.
For many of us, the third act of life is a long, but different, one.
If we look at this stage from a different angle, then this stage of life may bring us new insights. If we revisit and perceive this stage differently, we can make different choices that can make our old age better.
Human life in old age varies widely. For most people, it is not aging itself that causes pain, but rather a series of social behaviors that create threats and harm.
How to create a better old age? The answer to this question lies in bridging the gap between hard data and ingrained social biases.
Our future will be determined by our present attitudes.
This article is reproduced from the official account: Female Editor.