The Gift of Caring

The desire to help our elders navigate health issues is clear and universal—how to assure proper care and a good ending is not. Combining adroit storytelling skills with expert advice, The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents from the Perils of Modern Healthcare brings the reader into all-too-familiar scenarios facing our aging parents and offers answers to questions we may not know to ask until it’s too late.

Author and biologist Marcy Houle shares her personal journey of caring for her father, a surgeon, who developed Alzheimer’s, and later her mother who succumbed to other medical conditions. Like many children of aging parents, Marcy often felt powerless traveling this sad trajectory—watching them fall through the cracks of a fragmented and confusing health care system, where professionals often wrote off their symptoms as “just old age.” Not having the understanding of the changes that come with aging, she was led to believe there was nothing she could do to help.

The tragic secret? According to co-author and geriatrics physician, Elizabeth Eckstrom, MD, MPH, these symptoms frequently are not “just old age.” Rather, the problem is that the current health care delivery model for older people is ill-equipped to provide the comprehensive, person-centered care seniors need. Today, thousands of aging people face unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations, nursing home stays, and even death that could have been prevented or treated. Even more troubling, a large part of the issue is that many health care professionals have had little or no training in the care of older adults.

The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents from the Perils of Modern Healthcare reveals these pitfalls and provides families tools they can use to avoid them. Interspersed every few chapters of Marcy’s riveting story, Dr. Eckstrom shares professional medical insights into what Marcy could have done to safeguard her parents. Compiled from the latest research, she shows us how to navigate the system, how we can become our loved one’s best advocate, and what it is we need to know to achieve healthy aging and meaningful, compassionate final years.

Honest, at times humorous, and ultimately uplifting, The Gift of Caring sheds new light on aging from twin perspectives: a story of a daughter desperately seeking help for the parents she loved, and a geriatrician who gives us the knowledge we need to insist upon a better way.

Marcy Cottrell Houle is a biologist and award-winning author. Wings for My Flight won the prestigious Christopher Medal. It was a New York Times Notable Book and a Booklist Editor’s Choice, and was recently reissued. She has published articles in the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and Reader’s Digest, and has been featured on NPR and other national television programs and in periodical reviews. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Elizabeth Eckstrom, MD, MPH is Director of Geriatrics in the Division of General Internal Medicine & Geriatrics at Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), and cofounder of the OHSU Healthy Aging Alliance. She is a sought-after national lecturer and speaker, the author of numerous articles on geriatrics, and has received many honors and recognition for her innovative work. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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