With over 1/3 of all 60-year-olds taking five or more prescription medications, it’s no wonder that problems are occurring from overmedication. Polypharmacy, defined as “…when an adverse drug effect is misinterpreted as a new medical problem – leading to the prescribing of more medication to treat the initial drug-induced symptom,” can lead to a variety of additional health risks or worsening of existing health conditions. It’s advised that seniors and…
Safely Dispose of Medications with These Five Tips
With many aging parents taking many different prescriptions, and with health care professionals changing and adding dosages and medications to discover just the right solutions, it’s important to know what to do with prescription drugs that are no longer needed or that have expired. There are a number of options to safely dispose of medications:
The Health Advantages of Senior Socialization
It is intuitive to most of us that senior socialization improves health and wellbeing. It connects seniors to other people’s experiences, beliefs, challenges, humor, opinions, and various other human occurrences. Now, however, scientific studies are confirming seniors socializing with others actually can enhance the wellness of both their minds and bodies.
Music and Dementia: The Connection That Can Help Older Adults
Nowadays, music is more available than ever before. For those who take smartphones or tablets with them everywhere they go, hundreds of thousands – if not tens of millions of tunes – are simply a few touches or finger swipes away. If you are a caregiver for a senior, your smartphone can be one of the most helpful tools in your possession to help tap into the benefits of music….
Finding Work-Life Balance for Family Caregivers
Regardless of whether or not you love your job, the workplace can, at times, be stressful. Now consider how stressful it can be for those who have a second full-time job taking care of an older or disabled family member. For many family caregivers, balancing caregiving and a career can be virtually impossible, along with taking care of a home and family, and caring for an older loved one, which…
Family Caregiver Tips: Practicing Self Care
We plan for our careers. We plan to purchase a home. We plan for a family. However, life often has other plans and throws unanticipated curveballs. Taking care of an aging parent is often not a role most people plan for, and many are unaware of the financial burden, the amount of time required to provide that care, and the emotional toll it can take. Luckily, there are a few…
Making Multiple Sclerosis Patients Comfortable at Home
As Jane Austen once said, “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” And for someone with a chronic disease, like multiple sclerosis (MS), remaining as comfortable as possible, and, as safe as possible, is essential. Luckily, making multiple sclerosis patients comfortable at home is possible with a few tips and some outside help. If someone you love has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the preliminary step should…
Intro to Treating Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms
For those diagnosed with the disease, treating multiple sclerosis symptoms is a daily challenge. While there is no cure for multiple sclerosis (MS), hundreds of thousands of people in our country are living with it – around 400,000 individuals. Of that number, 86 percent of MS patients identify fatigue as the top symptom they’re experiencing when they discuss treating multiple sclerosis symptoms. The cause of MS is not known; it…
How to Make Nutritious Meals for Seniors
Our aging care professionals in Burlington understand that it’s not easy to make the right choices for nutritious meals for seniors when the guidelines for nutrition appear to constantly change. We had been told that saturated fats from sources including butter, red meat and fried foods were harmful and could affect a person’s odds of developing heart issues, but later studies indicated there isn’t enough evidence that those who gave…
Top 10 Tips for Proper Heart Medication Management for Seniors
If you or a senior loved one in your life have been diagnosed with heart disease, you know how important proper heart medication management for seniors is. It is essential to take heart disease meds exactly as prescribed. But what exactly does that mean? Here are a few helpful recommendations from Advanced Home Health Care to help you get the most from your meds: