Enjoy the golden years
SHOULD I be taking all these different medicines? Are they actually doing me any good? Do I want to live longer?
When British geriatrician Lucy Pollock, 56, was a young doctor, these were some questions her elderly patients and their families would have done well to ask, but often did not.
About three decades later, she has written a book “about the big questions of living to a very old age: What the questions are, how to ask them, and some of the answers”.
The Book About Getting
Older (For People Who Don’t Want To Talk About It) isa breezy read that addresses issues ranging from falls and responding to dementia to advance care plans and the Choosing Wisely campaign – an initiative which encourages conversations about reducing unnecessary tests and treatments.
“One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to give people more understanding of the joys of getting old, but also the challenges, and what the limitations are of medical treatments, so we can have a more realistic conversation,” says Dr Pollock via Zoom.
The book also touches on some of the biases people have towards older people, which can be seen in the use of language such as “demographic time bomb” and “fiercely independent”.
“If you are prejudiced against older people, you are prejudiced against your own future self,” she says.
Pollock trained in medicine at Cambridge University and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, worked as a junior doctor in East London and is now a consultant in Somerset, England.
She says that one thing older people can offer is a sense of perspective.
“The young today are so exposed to images of perfection all the time. From a very early age, your exam results have to be perfect, your body has to be perfect, your boyfriend, your holiday, everything. Older people know this is not how life works. “Most of my patients will look back and say, it hasn’t all been good, I’ve had some terrible times, but overall, I’ve had a good life. And I think it’s very important for young people to hear that.“
Older people, she adds, are really just people grown up.
“When I was a younger doctor, it was often easy to regard an older person as if he or she had always been old. And then you see a photograph of a patient wearing a swimming costume, in the 1950s or 1960s, and you think – hang on a moment, she was a young woman.”
Asked about the balance between prolonging life and having good-quality life in old age, she says: “It’s not just grand-scale things like chemotherapy or major surgery. Sometimes, it’s just about cutting back on simple tablets that somebody might not enjoy taking, or get side effects from, and actually are not making much of a difference.
“I’ve patients who are on really rigid diabetes diets and they are at the very end of their life. (I’d say), hey, stop it, eat something you like. Even on a small scale, we can make those changes.” – The Straits Times/asia News Network