In dating lingo, it's known as "reading the memo." There's the bore who rambles on about himself the entire evening (narcissist), the annoying guy who orders for you (control freak), the dude who has never, ever been in a long-term relationship (commitmentphobe).

In each case, a "memo" is delivered -- key information or insight into a person is imparted -- but it's not always "read" by the other party. Sometimes it's ignored, sometimes denial plays a role, other times it's just glossed over -- usually at the other party's peril. When the light bulb moment does occur down the track, it's often too late to avoid pain, grief, or suffering.

The same concept holds true in caregiving circles.

In an unscientific study of adult-children caregivers who attend my Sunday morning dance class in San Francisco, I've found that in every case ailing parents offered clues that all wasn't well with them and that it was time to pay closer attention...  Read more

Image courtesy of Jill Davey.

Like many caregivers, Jill Davey felt something had to give when her mother moved from Ohio into an assisted living facility to be near her daughter in Berkeley, California. Davey owns her own graphic design business, teaches several yoga classes a week, and pursues a spiritual practice. Her life is full and busy.

At first, she thought she'd have to stop teaching yoga in order to accommodate the increased demands of caring for her aging mother. She's still the only person whom her mom will allow to bathe her. Then she had her light-bulb moment: If she wanted to stay grounded during her caregiving years, she couldn't not teach yoga. Her passion for her practice and her students has helped the 52-year-old stay centered during some challenging days with a mother who can be, well, difficult. "Some might think of yoga as a peripheral thing when faced with the demands of caring for a parent," she says...  Read more

Image courtesy of Gail Persily.

Need convincing about the benefits of seniors sharing their thoughts in the blogosphere? Look no further than the lovely Claire's Kvetches, an often funny, frequently insightful blog by 84-year-old Chicago resident Claire Persily, who's having a tough time adjusting to life in a retirement community, loves that Barack Obama is our next president, recently underwent a hip replacement -- her first surgery in her entire life -- and, gosh darn it, she wants to tell us about all of it.

Claire's a pretty techno-savvy senior. She'd been instant messaging with her daughter Gail, who lives in San Francisco, for several years before they recently cooked up this blog project together. She describes her daughter, a librarian with the University of California at San Francisco, as her out-of-state tech support. The two have a comfortable conversation going on, blogging back and forth in cyberspace.

Claire...  Read more

You'd think three decades as a doc caring for elders would mean you'd have a relatively smooth time taking care of your own parent in her old age. Right?

Nope. Geriatrician (a doctor who specializes in the care of seniors) Dennis McCullough had to navigate his own bumpy journey on the road to caring for and helping his mother live well in her final years. At one time an active, healthy 85-year-old retiree, Bertha McCullough endured many typical late-life health challenges and ended her days as a much-weakened 92-year-old in hospice care. She died from the inevitable and irreversible frailty that afflicts the very old.

Such a senario may sound all too familiar to many of us. To complicate matters further, in the midst of his mother's decline, McCullough was struck by an autoimmune disease, reactive arthritis, for which traditional medicine didn't have an answer. The painful, disabling condition forced the physician to give up practicing medicine and pick up a pen...  Read more

Is it just me, or is everyone struggling to sleep well these days? Economic worries. Holiday stress. Caregiving challenges. Changes caused by aging. Pain. Lots of stuff to keep us all up at night. So I was intrigued to learn that for those of us who have difficulty snoozing soundly -- or care for someone who finds herself counting sheep -- help may be just a mouse click away.

In an attempt to wean us all off of sleeping pills and address a problem that has skyrocketed in recent years, large health insurance companies have turned to the Internet to offer online insomnia therapy, according to a recent Los Angeles Times story. Web sessions are offered by such big name health insurers as Aetna, some Blue Cross plans, Cigna, Kaiser Permanente, and WellPoint, according to the Times account.

Some 50 to 70 million Americans are plagued by some form of insomnia (having a hard time dozing off, staying asleep, waking up too soon)...  Read more

It seems apt today, when we take a collective moment to give thanks, to hear a caregiver named Tracy express her gratitude to the doctor who helped her mom.

Tracy's mother doesn't have cancer or dementia. No potentially life-threatening ailment features in this story. But as you'll see, for many older adults, taking care of the small stuff can have a big impact on quality of life.

Here's what happened: Tracy's 79-year-old mom, who lives near Spokane, Washington, experienced some short-term memory loss when her husband of 55 years passed away. Tracy figured it was a result of the understandable grief that accompanies the death of a loved one. But with time, her mom's memory didn't improve. She couldn't, for example, tell her daughter what she'd done that day. Tracy knew something wasn't right.

Tracy's sister found a geriatrician both daughters liked the sound of, and her mother, a former medical technician, reluctantly agreed to go for a checkup with the physician, who specializes in care for the elderly...  Read more

If you live in a food obsessed corner of the country, as I do, then you probably know about the slow food movement, which spread from Italy. Think local, sustainable, organic, good-for-you ingredients. Think a return to home-cooked meals, prepared with care from scratch. Think the opposite of, well, fast food.

So what, then, is the emerging philosophy known as slow medicine? Simply put, it's a less aggressive -- and less costly -- approach to medical care for the elderly than the status quo. Fewer hospital stays. Less risky interventions. Comfort over cure. It's about the opportunity to choose quality-of-life over quantity-of-years for folks entering their twilight days (typically those 80 plus).

In other words, more is not necessarily better.

When we imagine the best medical treament, we think of doctors pulling out all the stops in sleek hospitals, using life-saving, high-tech gadgets...  Read more

More people fear a shark attack, plane crash, lightning strike, or snake bite than developing diabetes. Clearly, our fears don't match reality. There's a diabetes epidemic, folks, but -- last I checked -- only a few unfortunate souls were felled by any of the above.

Alas, diabetes denial is not reserved for the undiagnosed. If you're caring for someone with type 2 diabetes, you may encounter resistance to recommended lifestyle changes that can keep diabetes complications at bay. Or this disease may take a backseat to other medical concerns such as Alzheimer's, stroke, or a broken hip. Perhaps the diabetes has already done significant damage. Or maybe he simply ignores the disease.

Whichever camp you fall into, since we're in the middle of American Diabetes Month, I thought this a good time to do a roundup of recent diabetes-related headlines.

Here, reasons readers should be concerned about diabetes -- and suggestions for how to handle the condition...  Read more

Last week I talked with three daughters who have all cared for their ailing mothers. The specifics of each situation are unique but one thing the trio has in common: They have all been -- or still are -- long-distance caregivers.

For two years, Barb Silver made a monthly trek to her mother's home on the other side of the country for a five-day visit. She says that period of her life, before her mother died, is a blur because she was sleep deprived and jet lagged much of the time. Judi Kaplan spent 18 months shuttling back and forth between her home in San Francisco and her mother's Santa Monica address before recently relocating her to the Bay Area. Janice Shapiro continues to make regular visits to her frail 93-year-old mother, now in a nursing home on the East Coast.

Providing assistance from afar presents challenges, regardless of whether its motivated by love, duty, guilt, or a combination of all three...  Read more

When former first lady Nancy Reagan or Barack Obama's grandmother take a tumble or two, as they have this year, it's all over the national news. And yet across America every day thousands of ordinary older adults slip or stumble and wind up with broken bones, nasty bruises, or -- worse -- disabling brain injuries.

Falling remains a widely underaddressed yet pervasive problem for the elderly. In the past we've pointed readers to useful fall prevention strategies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Fall Prevention Center of Excellence, and highlighted some high-tech home interventions that may keep an elder upright.

My colleague at Caring.com, Kate Rauch, also revealed in a recent post that some older folks keep falls secret -- and looked at why they stay mum. Her blog dovetails nicely with an article in Aging Today, in which former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Aging Fernando...  Read more

In her 20-year nursing career, award-winning, certified diabetes educator Theresa Garnero, a Caring.com expert, has helped thousands of older adults newly diagnosed with the disease. Theresa has devoted the past 10 years exclusively to diabetes care.

No need to just take my word for it, the uber-respected diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich sings her praises, too, in a recent post titled The Diabetes Educator We All Should See.

Ever since she started tackling this disorder, Theresa has been on the lookout for a useful diabetes guide for the newly-diagnosed, one that could help them manage this complex, often overwhelming, condition in a day-by-day interactive way -- with a little levity to offset the doom-and-gloom that so often accompanies a diabetes diagnosis. Frustrated that nothing like that was available, she teamed up with the American Diabetes Association to pen the just-released Your First...  Read more

Last week I wrote about how a second medical opinion may have saved Lois De Domenico's life.

Plagued by overwhelming fatigue and drenching night sweats, Lois sensed something serious was up, even though her regular doctor couldn't figure out what was wrong. So she sought out another physician who diagnosed a rare form of tuberculosis, immediately hospitalized her, and started treating the stubborn disease that took a solid six months for the normally fit and active 80-year-old to completely shake. Her word of warning: Follow your intuition and ask for another doctor's advice.

How to go about the business of seeking a second opinion? This week I've pulled together six simple strategies to get you going:

• Make a good choice. Find a qualified physician through AMA's Doctor Finder and make sure the doctor is a board-certified specialist by checking credentials with the American Board of Medical...  Read more

Lois De Domenico isn't prone to dramatic pronouncements. So I'm all ears when she tells me matter-of-factly that a second opinion "saved her life."

Here's what happened: The slim, lively, octogenarian philanthropist -- a veritable pin-up gal for the AARP set -- practices yoga every morning, eats a healthy diet, and had never had a major illness. But in September last year the San Francisco Bay Area resident began feeling ill, particularly in the evenings, and found herself dealing with unexplained fevers and drenching night sweats that saturated the bed sheets.

She went to her doctor. He did a work-up, couldn't find anything wrong, and sent her home with the advice to take a couple of Tylenol if the symptoms persisted. Lois didn't get better, found herself reluctantly leaving a fundraising event on a Friday evening, and drove herself home. The following Sunday she called her physician's practice and the on-call doctor offered to send her antibiotics...  Read more

Mom routinely nods off in the rocking chair while she knits. Dad snores loudly on the sofa all afternoon while the TV blares. Just typical snapshots of healthy aging among the silver-haired set, right?

Wrong. Despite the popular misconception, feeling old and tired don't have to go hand-in-hand. And, according to a recent study in the Journal of Gerontology, when a senior lacks energy, it could well be a sign that trouble is brewing.

Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center found that almost 1 in 5 senior citizens report feeling so lethargic that they spend most of the day sitting on the couch. Such behavior, stress the researchers, isn't normal and warrants investigation.

Study subjects reported napping over two hours a day, waking feeling tired, or simply not having enough energy to function. Those who felt worn out reported more health problems, such as sleep disorders, cardiovascular complaints, arthritis, and other ailments that commonly afflict the elderly than those who didn't feel spent...  Read more

We've all sung the doctor's office blues: 45-minute waits. 10-15 minute visits. A slew of unanswered questions as you're being shown the door.

But it doesn't have to be so. A little advance planning can make a big difference to how much you get out of each doctor's appointment.

Some pointers to help you and your parent or loved one make the most of your time:

1. Be prepared

• Keep a symptom diary and include dates, times, and frequency and severity of complaints your parent experiences. This can save time and relieve the doctor of having to play 20 questions after he opens with "What brings you in today?"
• Jot down questions you want answered and share these with the doctor. If the list is long, ask for help prioritizing concerns, and schedule follow-up visits to address outstanding issues as needed.
• Bring a bag of your parent's medications, supplements, and vitaminsor an up-to-date list...  Read more