What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Getting Older An Insider's Survival Manual for Outsmarting the Health-Care System

by Lachs, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780143120087
• ISBN10: 0143120085
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-30
• Publisher: Penguin Books

Summary

Aging well frequently involves feeling your way blindly through a complex medical world: dealing with multiple doctors, facing baffling financial decisions, and figuring out whether you or a parent needs care outside the home. What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Getting Olderturns the lights on, illuminating potential pitfalls and showing a way around them. This book is an indispensible survival guide, gathering all the information you need to have but that too often doctors just don't give you. Writing with great experience and good humor, renowned geriatrician Mark Lachs explains how to choose your doctors, stay out of the emergency room, plan financially for retirement, outfit your house to stay safe, and, most important, how to have as many healthy years as possible.

Author Biography

Dr. Mark Lachs is a physician, scientist, and gerontologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. His research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and he has appeared on The Today Show, NPR’s All Things Considered, and in many other national and local media outlets. His numerous honors and awards include a National Institute on Aging Academic Leadership Award and a Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholarship (the country’s preeminent career award in aging). He and his wife, Susan, a nurse practitioner, have three children and live in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
"You're a What?": Understanding How Geriatricians Think About Aging	p. 12
The Biology of Aging: An Embarrassment of Riches That You Were Never Supposed to Need	p. 26
A Geriatrician's Perspective on Ageism: It's Not Just Grandpa Who's Being Put Out to Pasture	p. 42
Do No Harm, but for God's Sake, Do Something!	p. 52
Cookbook Medicine: A Recipe for Disaster at Any Age	p. 65
Bedside Matters: Do You Have an Aging-Friendly Primary Care Doctor?	p. 78
How Many Specialists Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb (or Screw You Up)?	p. 105
Care Transitions as We Get Older: Cracks You Didn't Even Know You Could Fall Through	p. 116
No Place for Sick People: Hospitals as We Get Older	p. 131
You Could Become Geriatric Just Waiting: How to Emerge from the Emergency Room Unscathed	p. 156
In Search of an Honorable Discharge	p. 173
Maybe You're Not the Problem: Disability Caused by Places and Not People (or Their Diseases)	p. 192
Homes Away from Home as We Age	p. 203
Medications as We Age	p. 224
Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Vitamins, and Supplements: Who Do You Believe?	p. 235
Money and Aging	p. 257
Financial Gerontology: The Good, the Bad, and the Phony	p. 275
It Ain't Over Till It's Over (and Sometimes Not Even Then): A Geriatrician Talks about Death and Dying	p. 294
Staying in Control: Making and Encouraging Good Choices as We Age	p. 319
It's Never Too Late ...	p. 350
Appendix	p. 361
Notes	p. 371
Index	p. 379
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