Category: seniors

General interest/Health/Healthcare/Medicine/seniors
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Want to put your brain to good use?

by Fran Johns

child Head

(Part Two of Data Today – Better Tomorrow)

Could this be you? Creating a better tomorrow through brain research??

It turns out one does not have to be a pro football linebacker to have a brain worth studying. One does not even need to have a brain like Albert Einstein’s, Steven Hawking’s or any of those scientists/exceptionalists/geniuses whose brains would seem worth figuring out.

One only needs to be 18 or over and willing to be studied, and then to go sign up on the Brain Health Registry. This entitles you to sit back and wait for your brain to help discover a cure for Alzheimer’s or ADHD or depression, or perhaps help find better ways to treat traumatic brain injury. Not bad, for just having a brain and investing a little time (no money.)

This writer got off to a sluggish start as a Brain Health Registry member. Signed up early on because it sounds like such a great endeavor, but then I ran into a few off-putting instructions like “This will take about 20 minutes. It is best done in a quiet room where there will be no distractions or interruptions.” Twenty minutes, quiet rooms and absence of distractions are three things hard to come by around my house.

Eventually, however, the requisite conditions were found, and I was off to create a better tomorrow – well, in partnership with a few thousand other participants and some very smart neuroscientists – by finding out stuff about the human brain. And this is one fascinating journey. The neuroscientists find it fascinating because they really are going to figure stuff out. But for participants, the fascination is in the process.

Participants enter a little basic, very general data about medical/family history etc. Then the fun begins. We have two sets of ‘Cognition’ tests aimed at assessing our memory, attention and other cognitive characteristics. “These tests give us a sense of how your brain is currently functioning,” the screen says. This participant can only wonder what the Brain Health assessment people think about how her brain is functioning. The ‘Cognition’ tests are computer games on steroids. For a while you try to remember and replicate the pattern of dots, and then you go to the card games. The card games require Yes or No answers about what the cards are doing, press D for Yes and K for No. My brain kept trying to tell me what the cards were doing, while my fingers tried to remember that K was not for Yes.

It is, all in all, a lot more fun that the computer games the rest of the world is playing.

In another three to six months, the BHR people will be reminding me to go back and do it again, or do something else, to see how the brain is getting along. Perhaps they will flag my entry and advise me to check myself into an institution. But more likely they will just combine my data with the data of a zillion more or less anonymous others – and find a cure for Alzheimer’s! Or depression! Or improvements in treatment of traumatic brain injuries! All with the help of my weary, aging brain. Plus, when the survey was completed I got an email from UCSF professor Michael Weiner, MD telling me I am a medical hero. “You’re helping to make brain research faster, better and less expensive – and ultimately that gets us closer to a cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain disorders that strike tens of millions of Americans every year.” Who could resist?

You may want to go straight over to the Brain Health Registry and join the fun.

Health/Healthcare/Medicine/seniors/Women
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Data Today, Better Tomorrow, yay!

by Fran Johns

Women's Health Initiative

Some of us are suckers for studies: clinical trials, focus groups, surveys – whatever promises to shed a little light on the human condition, or possibly make that condition a little better.

This writer is a hopeless volunteer.

I have had my knees examined by MRIs, perhaps studying why I still have the originals despite a long history of abuse. I have had blood drawn for a study of celiac disease by someone who came to the house as part of the deal but unfortunately was not trained to find veins without causing excruciating pain. I have filled out lengthy surveys about addictive behavior – which may include addiction to study-participation (though that was not among the category choices.)

Currently, I am proudest of being an original part of the Women’s Health Initiative, which launched in 1993 with more than 160,000 postmenopausal women including this writer. In 1993 this was a Very Big Deal: studies had been made for all sorts of things with all sorts of participants, but finally there was a study of WOMEN. It sought to discover links between cancer (imagine! Studying women and cancer!) medical protocols, diet and other factors. Being a congenital wimp, and knowing I wouldn’t change my diet or stick to other proscribed regimens, I just signed up for the control group… but still. Even we control groupies are useful.

Over the years, WHI has developed a huge amount of useful data, probably the most beneficial being the finding that (imagine! Studying women!) hormone replacement therapy was not the be-all and end-all we had originally thought, but actually not such a good idea. (Read all about it.)

WHI has published over a thousand articles, approved well over 300 ancillary studies, and twice conducted extension studies. Findings have been about links between age, daily activities, diet etc and things like body fat, omega oils, heart disease, endometrial cancer – there is a list of useful discoveries resulting from this one large and ever-growing study project that boggles the mind.

Some – though surely not all – of this data is collected through regular survey forms received every year by WHI participants in addition to the annual birthday cards that by now this writer accepts as a “Congratulations! Are you’re still alive?” greeting. They seek data about lifestyles and life changes along with the traditional general health issues – and sometimes make one wonder what the next findings may be. My personal favorite question was, “When you enter a room full of people, do you often imagine they are talking about you?”

Paranoia after mastectomy? Who knows.

It is fascinating to be on the questioning end of tomorrow’s answers. Next blog: The Brain Health Registry. Assuming my closely-watched brain is still functioning.

Authors/compassion and choices/Death and Dying/Dying Unafraid/End-of-Life/General interest/Health/Medicine/physicians/seniors
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Life: a sexually transmitted, fatal condition

by Fran Johns

sunset

Life is a sexually transmitted condition that is invariably fatal.

That well-phrased truth – often attributed to British author Neil Gaiman – led off a talk not long ago at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club by Atul Gawande, physician and author of, most recently, Being Mortal. Gawande’s message was all about being mortal, and facing that inevitable death in advance. In other words, if we mortals could please just admit our mortality – and talk about what we’d like our final days/weeks/months to look like – much good would result.

This writer has been on that soapbox for several decades.

Gawande and his interviewer, University of California San Francisco professor Alice Chen MD, spoke of the need for shared decision-making, shifting away from the paternalistic ‘doctor knows best: here’s what we’re going to do for you’ attitude to the physician giving information and involving the patient in making choices. But their decision-making would still put the doctor first and patient second. This writer respectfully disagrees.

Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande

In response to a question from the audience, Gawande agreed that “a patient with unbearable suffering should be given the option to hasten death.” But he followed this perfectly rational statement with an irrational comment: “every hastened death is a failure of the medical system.”

Give us a break.

The medical system needs, at some point, to confront this reality: Life… is invariably fatal. The medical system cannot forestall anyone’s death forever. The medical system cannot protect, absolutely, against unbearable suffering. Compassionate physicians across the U.S. are recognizing this fact, and increasingly backing the legalization of aid in dying for the mentally competent terminally ill.

Gawande, Chen and countless others are proponents of palliative care, an excellent, relatively new segment of care in this country. They would have us believe that palliative care is the be-all and end-all of end-of-life care, and they oppose the option of legal aid in dying. Palliative care, an option many choose, is a fine addition to healthcare. It can keep pain to a minimum and often insure comfort; as a last resort, palliative sedation can render the patient essentially unconscious for whatever hours or days remain until death comes.

But it is a cruel myth that palliative care, or even the best hospice care, can guarantee anyone will slip peacefully from good life to gentle death. Pain, indignity, discomfort and distress are part of the process; some of us don’t want much of that.

Legal aid in dying, the option to choose at what point to let invariable fatality happen, is the only guarantee. It’s an option that we should all have.

compassion and choices/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/geriatrics/Health/Medicine/seniors
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Death, Dying & the Grey Zone

by Fran Johns

clouds

Death-and-dying usually goes with I-don’t-want-to-talk about-it.

Katy Butler wants us to talk about it. She worries, though, about the culture of death-denial, and about the lack of language when we do try to talk. How, for instance, do you say “I don’t want any more surgeries,” without its sounding like “I’m giving up”? Or how do you say “She doesn’t want that treatment” without its seeming you don’t want to keep Mom around? Especially when you know what Mom wants, but the doctors don’t?

Butler, author of the acclaimed 2013 memoir of her parents’ dying years Knocking on Heaven’s Door, spoke at a recent meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Network for End-of-Life Care. Network members – physicians, teachers, counselors and individuals associated with a wide variety of end-of-life organizations – were clearly in tune with the message: death comes, but few acknowledge or prepare for it. It’s that vast majority, those who don’t want to talk about it, who concern Butler and her audience, including this writer.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door details, in graceful prose, how Butler’s highly educated, physically active, devoted parents managed to get caught up in the brutal reality of dying in the U.S. Her father, a decorated veteran of World War II, suffered years of gradual descent, including having a pacemaker put in when that was mainly a cruel prolongation of suffering; her mother suffered in parallel but very different ways as his caregiver. It is all, Butler fervently believes, unnecessary suffering. She quotes her father as he declined:

“I don’t know who I am any more.” Another year or so later: “I’m not going to get better.” And still later, “I’m living too long.”

Butler speaks of this in terms of “the Grey Zone.” Whereas most of us want simple, black-and-white answers – “This pill will fix everything;” “you can expect to live another four to six months” – in truth, the time before dying is the Grey Zone. And whereas the Grey Zone used to be short and swift, today – thanks to modern medicine and technology – it is forever expanding.

ER

Everyone will enter the Grey Zone sooner or later. You, reader of these words, and I, writer. You may ski into a tree, or get hit by a truck tomorrow, causing your Grey Zone to be little more than a blur; I could have a major stroke or aneurism and be at the crematorium tomorrow. But in all probability, our Grey Zones will come in bits and pieces, and will extend for many months or years. They are likely to include a few hospital stays for broken bones or debilitating illnesses, chemotherapy for cancer, possible time on a ventilator, multiple medications with occasional unpleasant side effects, outpatient and inpatient experiences with doctors we have never seen before and encounters with medical technology yet to come.

Butler advocates shifting our Grey Zones away from the relentless need to prolong life at all costs to the consideration of what really makes life worth living. We would do well, she says, to be aware of when “that space between active living and dying” should shift from Cure to Care: to easing our way from good life into good death.

Butler’s understanding of these issues come from witnessing her father’s long, anguished journey through a Grey Zone of many years and her mother’s steadfast refusal to allow a similar prolonged struggle to mark the end of her own life.

Quite apart from the expanding battles to legalize medically hastened dying, the need to acknowledge the Grey Zone is equally urgent. Most of us would opt to shorten that space between active living and dying, or at the very least to move gracefully from good life into good death.

It can happen, but not without paying attention. Reading Butler’s book, with an eye to how you would like to knock on heaven’s door yourself, is a good way to start.

Because looking realistically ahead makes infinitely more sense than zoning out.

California/Campaigns/compassion and choices/Death and Dying/Dying Unafraid/End-of-Life/Healthcare/Law/Lifestyle/physicians/Politics & Causes/Religion/seniors
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Arguing With the Doctor – A plea for end-of-life choice

by Fran Johns

Dandelion

Does the doctor always know best? And in the case of one’s own precious life and death, is it wise to argue the point?

“No One Here Gets Out Alive” – a quote from Jim Morrison – led the title of a lively (pun intended) debate about aid in dying held recently at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Part of a series on the intersection of science and politics, the event’s full title was “No One Here Gets Out Alive”: The Science, Politics and Law of Death and Dying. The program sought to address a few issues not easily covered in two hours – but still – including (reprinted verbatim):

Is there a constitutional right to “physician-assisted suicide”? What about a “dignified death” – and what is a dignified death? Should terminally ill patients facing mental incapacitation or unbearable pain have access to fatal ingestion – also known as physician aid in dying? Or would that jeopardize our society’s progress toward more compassionate, comfort-based care?

Participants included John M. Luce, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Medicine and Anesthesia at the University of California San Francisco; Laura Petrillo, MD, a Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellow at UCSF; and program host David L. Faigman, Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law and Director of the UCSF/UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science and Health Policy.

The program kicked off with a discussion of the science of death itself – defining death being more and more problematic these days. Think Nancy Cruzan, kept alive through a feeding tube in a “Persistent Vegetative State” for nearly a decade until her family managed to convince the State of Missouri that she would never have wanted to be “kept alive.” Or Terri Schiavo, whose PVS ordeal lasted even longer. More recent is the tragic story of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, declared brain-dead by multiple physicians more than a year ago but whose body is still existing somewhere, connected to machines that keep her heart beating.

Those cases are just a few of the markers on the path toward today’s critically important death with dignity movement. This writer’s involvement in the cause began with work as a hospice volunteer in the 1980s, a member of an HIV support group in the ’90s and a volunteer with Compassion & Choices (and its predecessor organization Compassion in Dying) since the late 1990s. C&C is currently leading the fight to make aid in dying legal throughout the U.S., having won significant battles – five states now protect that right for terminally ill, mentally competent adults – with others underway in many areas.

And that issue – should medical aid in dying be legalized in California (and elsewhere) – was the heart of the two-hour program. Of the two physicians, Luce was eloquently in favor, and Petrillo was adamantly opposed. In this writer’s admittedly biased view, Luce’s lifetime of experience as a distinguished physician and professor rather embarrassingly outweighed Petrillo’s credentials, but it is possible to see her emerging-palliative-care-physician status as basis for her absolute certainty that everyone on the planet can experience graceful, pain-free death if only he or she has access to palliative care.

I am less certain. Thus my argument.

In the Q&A period, I posed this question to Petrillo: “If you were my doctor, which is unlikely, and I were dying, which is increasingly likely (I’m 81, for heaven’s sake,) and I have expressly, repeatedly made clear that I do not wish to linger – why should you have the right to insist that I linger?”

Petrillo dodged the question. “I would ask what is causing your pain,” she said. “I would try to determine if you are depressed, and talk about how we can alleviate your pain and possible depression…”

After several abortive attempts to get a response to my question, and figuring the audience had not paid good money to listen to me rant, I gave up. But here are the arguments I had for Dr. Petrillo, questions I wish the minority of physicians who do still oppose aid in dying would answer:

Why should you have the right to insist that I linger, when I am dying?

How can you presume to understand my pain better than I? And why should I have to describe it if I don’t choose to do so?

When I have watched dying people with the very best care and pain control suffer in ways I would not choose to suffer, how can you insist on my going that route?

Why should your conviction about the efficacy of your medical field trump my autonomy?

Dr. Petrillo said she is not religious, so this question would be addressed to others: Why should your religion overrule my religion? Or dictate to me?

It’s my only precious life, after all. Why should I be denied control of its precious end?

 

 

 

California/General interest/Lifestyle/San Francisco/seniors/Sports
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When Fences Come Down

by Fran Johns

Fence.Mtn Lake

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost, and I think he was onto a larger truth. Of course, Frost – in his “Mending Wall” – was talking about rocks and neighbors, and the poem leaves us with ambivalence about the goodness of fences.

Fences and walls may, at times, make good neighbors – but the big ones tend to be symbols of enmity (think Berlin, Israel, Arizona…) and we just want them down.

A few months ago a high, dark fence went up around lovely Mountain Lake, in the San Francisco park that is one of my favorite spots on the planet. It’s a city park, but the lake (fortunately for us all) is part of the Presidio National Park and has been undergoing an extraordinary restoration for the past few years. It may not yet be back to the purity that made its water just fine for Spanish settlers (and probably the Ohlone and Coast Miwok indigenous people before them) to drink, but years of accumulated glunk, trash and sludge have been hauled away and the lake’s return to life has been a rare joy to watch.

The problem? Although the waters began to clear and native greenery emerged, a proliferation of non-native fish were quashing any hope of bringing back the fish who once belonged. We’re not talking just a couple of ordinary intruders. It was possible to stand on the beach near the murky water’s edge and watch goldfish the size of ahi tuna swimming casually back and forth. With native fish and turtles long displaced by casually dumped household pets, the lake was overrun with carp, bullfrogs – somebody reported a sturgeon – and who knows what else. This writer remembers the brief residence of an alligator, who famously evaded a gator hunter imported from Florida but was eventually removed to the local zoo.

Presidio Trust personnel tried snagging, netting and every known removal method before conceding that the only solution would be to poison the lake. They chose plant-based Rotenone, which kills everything with gills (and happily not much without) and disappears within three days. Thus the fence went up – presumably it was still not a good idea for gill-free people to be wandering near the water. Almost the moment the solution was poured into the four-acre lake, the alien fish died. They were scooped up by the thousands to be studied by ecologists (who reluctantly went along with the project) to determine their origin and soon composted as a final act of goodness. But the fence, for assorted reasons, did not come down.

Sign.Mtn Lake

And over the long weeks that followed it was as if the park itself was inhabited by an alien being. Children still played on the adjacent swings and slides, dog walkers still tossed tennis balls, this writer still exercised on the bars of the fitness trail – but the now-sparkling lake was hidden behind its foreboding shield. Even when the gulls could be heard returning beyond the black screen, and actually seen if you peered through the mesh, the park felt bifurcated and somehow forlorn. Thanksgiving came and went, Christmas was less merry, the New Year not yet happy.

A few days ago, the fence came down. Mountain Lake, the shimmering heart of Mountain Lake Park reappeared, putting on a show of new life. A few familiar ducks may never have left; now they have been joined by coots and grebes and a spiffy ruddy duck who is apparently courting two slightly less flashy lady ruddy ducks. Western pond turtles, chorus frogs and native fish will begin to return in the spring.

Lake.Mtn Lake

The metaphors are abundant: fences come down, sunlight spreads from reflected waters, varied creatures happily coexist, romance blooms.

 

Where is Robert Frost when we need him?

 

 

 

 

Death and Dying/Dying Unafraid/End-of-Life/geriatrics/seniors
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Danger Zone in End-of-Life Talk

by Fran Johns

carved ice dove

A suicide pill for everyone over 85? Not the wisest plan to suggest right now. But it is, in fact, a possibility put forth by Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In a letter published in the New York Times on November 13, Appleby notes a recent anti-longevity article by Ezekiel Emmanuel and a new book on end-of-life care by Atul Gawande (both physicians,) and says,

“Perhaps the moment is right for broaching the idea of what we might call prophylactic suicide: the decision of an elderly person to pre-empt the grim reaper and avoid the disabilities of extended life.”

Appleby goes on to note that organizations such as Compassion & Choices, with which this writer has worked closely for well over a decade, “are campaigning for dignified terminations of life for those with incurable diseases” but writes, “What I propose goes a step further, extending the right to people before they face terminal or debilitating illnesses.”

Not surprisingly, Appleby’s letter – one of The Times’ regular “Invitations to Dialog” – drew more than 300 responses. Nine were selected to appear either in print or online; this writer’s is among those online and is as follows:

“I strongly support the right of a terminally ill, mentally competent adult to choose aid-in-dying, now legal in five states, but Ms. Appleby does a disservice to the cause by suggesting “a step further” — prophylactic suicide. The latter bears no relation to the former.

“We would be far better served to fight unwanted medical treatment, so often futile and excruciatingly painful at the end of life, and to enforce individual advance directives. My own directives (I’m 81) stipulate that no medication other than pain relief be given should I become unable to speak for myself, and stress that I do not wish to be fed if unable to feed myself. More important, all of my children and close friends understand these wishes because we’ve had the conversation.

“Let’s work toward those sane measures, and leave “suicide” out of it.”

Because the Death With Dignity movement is so important, and informed dialog about it so critical, it is both tragic and dangerous to have misinformation and misperception spread. There’s been enough of both over the decade+ in which the movement has slowly gained strength. To set the record straight:

Death With Dignity – the right of a terminally ill, mentally competent adult to ask a physician for aid in dying – is now legal in five states (Appleby left out New Mexico) and the movement is fast gaining ground in half a dozen others. This is partly because people increasingly understand that Death With Dignity is not suicide – and is certainly no kin to “euthanasia,” as Emmanuel would have us believe. Under Death With Dignity laws, death comes because of a disease. Every death certificate for those who have considered or used DWD laws lists the cause of death as the disease; it is not caused by suicide. Euthanasia would never be allowed under DWD laws.

But the movement is also gaining strength because it has been carefully thought out and tested. Because it is rational and safe. DWD laws are designed to promote individual autonomy, and incorporate safeguards against abuse.

Much of the opposition (as evidenced in several of the letters in The Times) comes from misunderstandings which are advanced by Emmanuel’s and others’ misuse of the word “suicide” and by fears that the elderly will be encouraged to get out of the way as Appleby’s notion suggests. Both writers muddy the waters and undermine an important cause.

Death With Dignity is a safety zone. Irresponsible words throw it into a danger zone.

 

Feminist Collection/Health/Lifestyle/seniors/Women
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WHI: Strengthening Women’s Health

by Fran Johns

WHICould the health and wellbeing of a few million women be improved, and a few billion dollars saved in the process? A very big dream.

When the Women’s Health Initiative was established more than 20 years ago, no one was talking in grandiose terms and few would have anticipated the wide-ranging health benefits (and huge cost savings) that would result in the decades ahead. Many of us were simply saying, “Imagine this. At last we’re studying women to find answers about women’s health issues.”

This writer was proud and happy to enlist in the first WHI study. I joined more than 100,000 other postmenopausal women volunteering to fill out forms, have blood drawn and answer questions over the next 15 years. That initial focus was on tracking the effects of hormone therapy, dietary patterns and/or calcium/vitamin D supplements on prevention of heart disease, cancer and osteoporotic fractures. I had not yet had breast cancer – that would come about 10 years into the study; a family history of osteoporosis added to my personal interest in WHI. Over the years I volunteered to participate in some of the wide-ranging ancillary studies looking at other health-related things like physical activities, lifestyle, tobacco and dozens of peripheral issues. (My personal favorite question appeared on one of the multi-page annual update forms. It read – Yes or No – “When you enter a room full of other people, do you have the feeling they are talking about you?” There may someday be a report on women and paranoia.)

Mysterious questions aside, WHI is serious business. Here, excerpted from the latest Extension Study newsletter are a few facts about what has been learned from the historic initiative, and a little of what is still ahead.

Those hormones millions of postmenopausal women were taking, widely thought to be miracle answers? Studies showed the risks far outweighed the benefits, and millions stopped taking them. Hormones in different combinations had been commonly taken to minimize chances of cardiovascular disease, cancers, fractures, diabetes, gall bladder disease and a variety of quality-of-life measures; quitting the hormones proved a better choice. Health benefits can’t be precisely measured, but the reduction in hormone use has led to a decrease in rates of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease.

And in dollars and cents? Some $37.1 billion, (in 2012 when all costs and quality-adjusted years of life are considered, has been the total economic return of the WHI trial.

By June, 2014, over 1000 papers based on WHI data had been published in scientific journals. What’s ahead? Researchers are looking at pet ownership and risk of cardiovascular disease; physical activity during childhood and risk of Alzheimer’s disease; breast cancer distribution by rural/urban areas and geographic differences in cognitive decline/dementia.

Every year on their birthday, WHI study participants receive a card – some of us call it the “Hooray, you’re still alive” card. For women everywhere, it represents something worth more than gold.

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