Your loved one is now a resident in an assisted living facility, skilled nursing facility or memory care unit, but you no longer feel good about the place he or she is living. I have seen this happen time and time again with family members, friends, and patients.

I recently experienced an in-person gathering with family. How nice it was to be able to all be together, no masks required. It was so nice to be able to be together without nagging fear or guilt in the back of my mind, wondering if I or one of my other family members might be unknowingly passing COVID-19 onto one of the people we love most in the world.

The Chartered Care Collection (06/01/2021) provides a review of the latest, pertinent publications from the medical literature on aging. In this month's collection: activities to reduce dementia, brain changes in those with dementia, early rehab after stroke, and pain after knee replacement surgery.

Risk factors for falls at home include both those specific to the individual and those specific to the environment. There are many ways to mitigate risk of falls at home.

The majority of the elderly will at some point end up in the hospital. If you are caring for an aging parent, there is a good chance your loved one has experienced what is so common in the hospital; that is delirium.

The goal I have for my patients when I bring them into rehab is that they return to their prior residence or at least somewhere where they can live as independently as possible. There are very few patients I have that discharge to home without some sort of home medical equipment, also called durable medical equipment (DME).

The Chartered Care Collection (05/04/2021) provides a review of the latest, pertinent publications from the medical literature on aging. In this month's collection: early mobility after hip surgery, BMI impact on knee replacement, PRP vs HA injections for knee arthritis, and complications after carpal tunnel surgery.

Sue had a stroke nearly two months ago. It occurred on the right side of her brain, causing some difficulty with her speech and causing weakness on the left side of her body. Once she was stable from the medical standpoint, she went to acute inpatient rehabilitation. She was there for a couple of weeks. She made awesome progress.

Temporary changes to a home often are necessary in order for someone to go home directly from the hospital or from rehabilitation. The physical and occupational therapists are not just experts in guiding one to regain strength, balance and endurance for improved functional independence; they are also experts in working with the surrounding environment to make it the safest place in which to allow one to be mobile and tend to their individual ADLs.

Envision a line of someone starting at point A and climbing up at an angle to point B. Now, I am assuming you are seeing a nice straight line making its way up to that next point. Erase that straight line and imagine it moving up and down though still SLOWLY making its way up. This is how I describe rehab, especially that after a stroke, to my patients and their family members.

This month’s Collection looks at pain progression in the elderly, rapid versus standard rehab protocol after knee replacement surgery, non-medication interventions for Alzheimer’s and lifestyle decisions effect on cognition in older adults.

COVID cost Tony a month in the hospital, a tracheostomy and a PEG tube. His younger age, fitness and hard work allowed him to survive and gradually recover to his pre-illness state.

June became one of my patients in the subacute rehabilitation facility. June knows how she contracted COVID. Her husband had required emergency open heart surgery in March. Unbeknownst to June and her husband, he contracted COVID-19 while in the hospital for the surgery.

This week I want to focus on one of the first post-COVID patients I provided care to. Let’s call this patient Bob. This was a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic and I was just getting back into the skilled nursing facilities where I provide consultations to the patients receiving subacute rehabilitation.

This past year I have treated several patients in rehabilitation following a hospitalization for COVID-19, and each patient has had a very different recovery process. I think this just reaffirms the mystery of COVID. There is so much variability as to who it affects, how it effects each person, survival of that person, and if they do, what the recovery looks like.

This month’s Collection looks at pain progression in the elderly, rapid versus standard rehab protocol after knee replacement surgery, non-medication interventions for Alzheimer’s and lifestyle decisions effect on cognition in older adults.

A geriatric psychiatrist is a physician who completed a residency in psychiatry and then did an additional year-long fellowship that was specific to geriatric psychiatry. This fellowship provides specific training to the psychological issues that are more common in the elderly as well as the physiological differences in the elderly.

Thankfully, our aging loved ones are going to be able to be out and about more with the administration of the COVID-19 vaccine. Now is the time to start getting the things in place to reverse debility, by improving their strength and endurance, in preparation to get out and enjoy life again.

I spoke with a client not long ago who was contemplating moving her mom, who was recently diagnosed with dementia, to an assisted living facility closer to her so that she would be able to provide more hands-on assistance as her mom’s dementia progressed. She said her mom was early on in her diagnosis and was still, for the most part, able to do most activities of daily living for herself.

Spinal cord injuries are often life-altering events. Given the acute, serious nature of spinal cord injuries I wanted to provide insight about what to expect in the first week or so after the initial spinal cord injury. Spinal cord injuries are generally life-long journeys, and there are things to expect at different time points of the rehab and even post-rehab processes.