Have you taken a peek into your senior loved ones’ medicine cabinets lately? According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, the average senior is prescribed more than 27 new medications each year. Twenty-seven! And that includes a 20% increase in narcotics prescribed for pain relief over a period of five years.
If you factor in all of the doctors’ appointments, therapy sessions, and hospital procedures along with all of those medications, it’s easy to see the big picture of aging health is both costly and potentially dangerous.
And although the goal, of course, is to keep seniors as healthy throughout the aging process as possible, many feel that our focus as a society has been far too often on medical interventions, and far too infrequently on the type of care needed to improve quality of life. With as many as 12 million Americans requiring assistance with activities of daily living, one of Heaven at Home Care’s goals as advocates for older adults in Texas is to help educate those in the medical realm on the benefits professional home care can provide.
According to Howard Gleckman, contributing writer for Forbes.com, “Rather than doing that third scan on the same body part, we could better spend our dollars on home delivered meals or an adult day program for an otherwise homebound senior.”
Better communications between doctors, seniors and their families is essential to ensure that quality of life is not being sacrificed in favor of aggressive medical procedures, but instead, that appropriate care is provided according to the patient’s wishes and goals.
Read more of Gleckman’s perspective on aging health and medical treatment, and contact one of the top home health agencies in Denton, TX, Heaven at Home Care, to learn more about how our senior care in Denton, TX and the surrounding areas is helping seniors live life to the fullest each and every day!