Cooking was one older man’s greatest pleasure, until memory loss forced him out of the kitchen. He could no longer remember what was behind his own cabinet doors or inside the drawers. When he became depressed, his doctor recommended anti-depressant medications.

Thanks to his daughter’s ingenuity, those anti-depressants were not necessary. She taped pictures of cups, plates, and utensils on the fronts of her father’s cabinets and drawers. With his tools visually labeled, the chef was soon happily back to work.

Gerontologist Dr. Mark Lachs shared this story at a well attended May 9th community lecture in Greenwich, CT. Dr. Lachs’s talk focused on his book, Treat Me, Not My Age. The event was part of the William J. Oppenheim Lecture Series on Healthy Aging at Greenwich Hospital.  Dr. Lachs is Director of Geriatrics at New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System and Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

“Look in the mirror,” Dr. Lachs advised the audience, “if you want to see your best primary care doctor.” His point was that patients – or their caregivers – need to speak up and advocate for appropriate care. His book, Treat Me, Not My Age offers invaluable, detailed advice born of Dr. Lachs’s experience with older patients and their caregivers.

For many older patients, appropriate care may mean less care. While hospital stays and medications are sometimes necessary, they can make patients sick – or sicker. Decreased mobility, delirium, and even the use of adult briefs during inpatient stays have caused older patients (and some younger ones) to enter a nursing home well before their time.

Treat Me, Not My Age contains wise solutions for dealing with what Dr. Lachs called “our broken healthcare system.” From practical tips for outfitting a safer home to a doctor’s advice on staying healthy throughout life, Treat Me Not My Age is a guidebook for all health consumers – young as well as mature.

Advocating for a relative and modifying a home environment is time intensive and often stressful for the caregiver. The demands can be unbearable, especially for caregivers who perform the non-medical care necessary to keep an older patient at home.

One caregiver in the audience explained that despite Medicare and Medicaid coverage, her mother was not eligible for continued physical therapy. She had reached what was considered a treatment plateau. When Dr. Lachs responded that he sometimes worked with families to help continue the exercises at home, I imagined a tired caregiver serving as an exercise coach at the end of her busy day.

I asked Dr. Lachs how a caregiver could manage the work required to bridge the treatment gaps for an older relative, especially if that caregiver also has a job, young children, or lives out of state.

Warning that stress-related illnesses are a frequent result of caregiving, Dr. Lachs first said that caregivers must take great care of themselves.  That’s advice caregivers have also heard on eCareDiary.com, which offers support and helpful tools such as the Care Diary. Experts on ecarediary.com have also suggested support groups, technologies, and strategies for finding help from others in the community and family.

Some caregivers already know what helps them to be at their best. It could be a therapy group, a weekly golf or bowling game with friends, quiet walks, or meditation. What’s important is that caregivers recognize that they are the unsung heroes of a “broken” healthcare system and that they need and deserve care for themselves.

For caregivers who are not local, Dr. Lachs recommends a geriatric care manager. Caregivers should also consider the technologies that make it possible to monitor a home environment from a distance. One system he described could send reports on the temperature of a house or apartment, and on whether the refrigerator had been opened by noon. This new technology had helped one older man who cherished his autonomy but lived alone. Aside from a false alarm when the man spent a night with his girlfriend, the home monitoring struck a balance between security and privacy. As Dr. Lachs pointed out, it was a welcome solution for the patient as well as his family.

To learn more about how to confront the challenges of caregiving in collaboration with your physician, tune in to our "Caregiver & Physician Conversations" Radio Show, on the last Tuesday of every month at 2PM EST.

Kim Harke is a health care technical writer specializing in compliance. She holds a Master’s in history from New York University.