Elderhood Quotes

“that the experiences of older people in our health care system are indicative of how current medical care is broken for all of us. We have created a society where we do everything possible to stay alive yet dread being old, a culture that discards people who don’t fit the latest human “product specifications,” and a health care system in which the work of medicine is often incompatible with both care and health.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“Disease in man is never exactly the same as disease in an experimental animal, for in man the disease at once affects and is affected by what we call the emotional life (and, I would add, social environment). Thus, the physician who attempts to take care of a patient while he neglects this factor is as unscientific as the investigator who neglects to control all the conditions that may affect his experiment … One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“To most people’s surprise, a large study of the United States found that midlife is the time of least happiness, greatest anxiety, and lowest life satisfaction23 for both men and women. Things begin looking up around age sixty—and not because the “younger old” are skewing the curve. The Gallup World Poll, which studies countries large and small, poor and rich, agrarian and industrialized, finds that life satisfaction assumes a U-shape across life24 in wealthier countries but different patterns elsewhere. Data from the United States and Western Europe confirm that most people are around sixty before they achieve levels of well-being comparable to those of twenty-year-olds,25 and rates climb thereafter. The increased well-being of old people seems made up of both declines in negatives and increases in positives. In one recent study, anxiety marched steadily upward26 from the teenage years to its greatest heights between ages thirty-five and fifty-nine. In the early sixties, it dropped markedly, falling again at sixty-five, then staying at the life span’s lowest levels thereafter. Conversely, sixty- to sixty-four-year-olds were happier and more satisfied with their lives than people aged twenty to fifty-nine, but not nearly as happy as those aged sixty-five and over. Even those over age ninety were happier than the middle-aged. As the poet Mary Ruefle has said, “You should never fear aging because you have absolutely no idea the absolute freedom in aging; it’s astounding and mind-blowing. You no longer care what people think. As soon as you become invisible—which happens much more quickly to women than men—there is a freedom that’s astounding. And all your authority figures drift away. Your parents die. And yes, of course, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s also wonderfully freeing.”27 In sum, depending on the measure, by their later sixties or early seventies, older adults surpass younger adults on all measures, showing less stress, depression, worry, and anger, and more enjoyment, happiness, and satisfaction. In these and similar studies, people between sixty-five and seventy-nine years old report the highest average levels of personal well-being, followed by those over eighty, and then those who are eighteen to twenty-one years old.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“The body is also what most people respond to, whether looking at someone else or at ourselves. Twenty-one years before she died at the age of ninety-four, Doris Lessing also referenced the growing distance between her body and self: "The great secret that all old poeple share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion."
Comments like these, common as they are among both great writers and my patients, make me wonder whether the greatest challenge of elderhood is overcoming our tendency to look at old age and see only body decline, forgetting that inside the body is a fellow human being.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“Another truth cannot be denied: it was one of those moments when the world reminded me that I, too, would become old. Not only was I shocked; my first reaction was one of distancing and denial.
Simone de Beauvoir captured this stance in The Coming of Age: "When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us - when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to." This divorce of the current self from the future self distances us from the biological and social diminishment of old age. Such actions are essentially human. Almost everyone can relate to them. We cleave toward those like us and toward those who make us feel like our best and most powerful selves.
The people who push back most ferociously against the label 'old' are people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who don't (yet) conform to stereotyped associations with that word. They make comments along the lines of: "I am still active and looking forward to the future so find having the world old attached to me disconcerting." Their argument is that they are not ill or disabled, despondent or dependent, and therefore not 'old', their chronological age notwithstanding.
Since the definition of 'old' is having lived a certain number of years, usually sixty or seventy, it seems we have created a society in which carrying that label is so awful that octogenarians leaning on walkers adamantly assert they are not old. Clearly, the human life cycle isn't the problem. Societal prejudice is so strong, and the category old so stripped of respect and social worth, that old people feel compelled to argue against the obvious.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“When asked the recipe for a good old age, I often give a list: good genes, good luck, enough money, and one good kid, usually a daughter.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“The health impact of social isolation is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.19 All else being medically equal, loneliness increases mortality by 26 percent.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“In the twenty-first century, it worships machines, genes, neurons, hearts, and tumors, but cares little about sanity, walking, eating, frailty, or suffering. It values adults over the young and old, and hospitals and intensive care units over homes and clinics. It prioritizes treatment over prevention, parts over wholes, fixing over caring, averages over individuals, and the new over the proven.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“Ageism allows the younger generations to see older people as different10 from themselves; thus, they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“Since 2007, Alzheimer’s has been the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, and for people eighty and over, it’s now in fifth place for men, third for women. But even that isn’t quite right. For the most part, the causes of death that have led the CDC listings for the last century are broad categories of disorders such as “diseases of the heart,” “malignant neoplasms,” and “accidents” (unintentional injuries). As a result, many diseases fall under each heading, and the numbers of deaths counted are high. If we list heart attacks, heart failure, arrhythmias, and other cardiac conditions separately but cancer as a single entity, for example, heart diseases would not top the list; cancer would. But cancer would also drop lower down the list if we separated out the different types—listing breast, lung, skin, prostate, colon, blood, and each of the many others individually. Yet the CDC considers Alzheimer’s a separate disease on its own, rather than grouping the many dementias together. A more taxonomically consistent approach would be to have a dementia category that included vascular, Lewy body, frontotemporal, and all the other dementias. This matters because where a condition appears on this and other lists affects all aspects of medicine—from doctor training to money for research and departments within health systems, as well as the public’s imagination and our political and social priorities.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“He’d been the victim of a “prescribing cascade.”4 It started when he was given a new blood pressure pill, a good and common one, but—as is the case for almost all drugs— one with side effects. In Dimitri, it had precipitated gout. Instead of changing medications, his doctor treated the gout with a strong anti-inflammatory drug that caused heartburn, earning Dimitri another new medicine. And so it went, each side effect treated with another medication that caused another side effect that was treated with yet another medication, and so on. Just as bad, even when his problems got better, as his gout had, the medications were continued. In just a few months, he’d gone from healthy to bedbound.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“But two appeared on the Beers Criteria, a national list of potentially inappropriate medications for older adults. The list warns of increased risks for adverse reactions. The hope is that doctors will think twice before prescribing such medicines to patients over seventy and, whenever possible, use alternatives.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“The House of God, made clear, old people were “gomers,” an acronym for get out of my emergency room, and defined as “a human being who has lost—often through age—what goes into being a human being.” The”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“would have made them more comfortable, more functional, healthier, and happier—things like hearing aids, enough time with their doctor, or exercise classes that would help treat many of their chronic diseases while increasing their chances of remaining independent. Nor could they get two of medical care’s most essential elements: scientific data about the pros and cons of the care they received, or being treated as a human being worthy of resources and concern.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“The Journey of Life, the insightful Thomas Cole calls this our “paradigmatic polarity”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“efficiency is a concept best applied to organizations and systems, not people and human interactions.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“where we do everything possible to stay alive yet dread being old, a culture that discards people who don’t fit the latest human “product specifications,” and a health care system in which the work of medicine is often incompatible with both care and health.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“We prize youth, though doing so means that all of us will spend most of our lives in a state of failure.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“We are all formed of frailty and error;12 let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“At present, we count only a small fraction of medicine’s harms, prioritizing those suffered by patients over those to staff and systems, and counting almost exclusively the harms that visibly affect the body or its function while ignoring the scars of violent words, actions, and policies on psyches and relationships.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“pogroms”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“imagine its early years, and if I’m lucky, decades, much like the best parts of midlife: the solid sense of who I am and how I want to spend my time, the decreased volume of the sorts of ambitions easily”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“A silver medical building would offer easy, safe access that doesn’t require walking long distances, opening heavy doors, going to multiple locations, or standing in long wait lines. Its building materials would reduce noise, and design features would optimize lighting and minimize overstimulation, distraction, and risk of falls. Doors, rooms, and public areas would accommodate walkers, wheelchairs, and a person walking side by side or arm in arm with a friend, family member, or caregiver. Space use would prioritize navigation and accessibility, offering regular places to rest and regroup. Such changes would increase accessibility, nonpunitively acknowledge patient challenges, recognize old people as valued customers, and create a safer, more pleasant, and welcoming environment for all patients and families. Architecture”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

“So many parts of our complicated human lives don’t easily lend themselves to measurement or experimentation.”
― Louise Aronson, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life