Health knowledge made personal
Lynn,
As a teacher of movement, I started working with seniors two years ago and found that age is irrelevant when it comes to improving a seniors quality of life. I know this may be a bold statement however through my method of teaching balance, flexibility and range of motion exercises, seniors respond and improve.
Simply stated, what I know about active 90 year olds (and other seniors of course) is that they want to stay active. They just need a program that:
makes sense to them
helps them use it as more than exercise
help them work at their level - regardless of what it is, and improve their capabilities
and helps them see immediate and tangible results
As an active healthy 70-year-old I agree- but the research is lacking for the reasons stated in the article I cited.
Lynn
http://bit.ly/beinghealthy
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Posted by Dr. Lynn Dorman
Almost nothing!
This news clip is amazing!
Full article:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/knowledge_about_human_health_o.html
Why don't we know? Because no one knows where to find healthy active 90-year-olds....it seems we only know where to find the sicker ones!
In the USA, we have generally ignored the "real" aging population - focusing instead on our bias that all "old people" are frail, needing help and afraid of doing anything that may lead to getting hurt. So we only look at the frail, weak and less active among the older generations.
We need to put a major focus on healthy aging and prevention..we are a country obsessed with disease and "cures" but the old saying about that "ounce of prevention" works for all ages. We say we have a health care system but we have a disease care sytem. We need to stop spending all the time and money on cures and start spending on prevention of the problems as well.
As the article concludes: