Geriatric Education for all in Health Care

Geriatric medical care is similar to pediatric medical care in that the rules of thumb that work for the rest of population do not fit. The patient's issues are more complex and demand specialized understanding. When caring for my mother, steadily declining with Alzheimer’s and other issues common to aging, we met several instances of medical professionals who failed to get geriatric training. When her knee was in great pain, an orthopedist responded, “What do you expect at your age?” Then he told of his army days - how men with far worse pain walked through it. She felt defeated, shamed, and without hope for her joint issue. Then in her last days, when switching pain medications, her dosage was miscalculated and she was overdosed. Older patients commonly need lower dosages for similar effects. Hearing her symptoms, the on-call nurse told us to just give her more morphine for comfort. She recovered by withholding the morphine, working with her, then later starting it with a smaller dosage. Now I care for my father, who has another type of dementia. We visited a psychoneurologist who showed him his CAT scan and told him, "See, you have holes in your head; I will be talking to your daughter instead of you." The failure to provide dignity to this man was a failure of the system to provide geriatric training to its medical professionals. The elderly are quickly becoming a larger and larger percentage of the population. All medical professionals will increasingly have more patients in the older adult range. Please contact your representatives and ask them to make geriatric training a routine part of a medical professional’s education and required for continued certification.