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Toby Laping Associates www.WNYCareManager.com
Eldercare News |
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You Need To Know . . . About Your Health Care Provider by Toby F. Laping, Ph.D., C.S.W. There are some excellent doctors, nurse practitioners, and other health care providers around town. Many of them are caring, empathetic, bright, and astute. Not all of them like older people, however, and sometimes their attitudes or their environments make that very clear. It’s tough to be a primary care provider in Western New York without having a large number of elderly patients, but there are those who appear to prefer a lower average age in their patients. Those are the doctors you want to stay away from. When you go to your doctor, if there are five or six steps to get into his office you can pretty well guess that this is not someone who has thought about how to be older patient-friendly. Maybe you’d be better off not trying to climb those stairs in order to get good medical attention. Rather, maybe you need a new doctor If your doctor wonders if you have any questions and so you ask why it’s so painful to stand up out of your favorite chair, and the answer you get is that you’re old, you need to know that’s an inadequate answer. It’s time to find a doctor who will pay attention to your questions and treat you with respect, and answer your questions as they deserve to be answered. If you ask your doctor to pay attention to your memory loss and your doctor says that everyone has memory loss when they’re in their 80s and not to worry your little head about it and you feel as though you’ve been patronized, it’s time to look for another care provider. If your doctor isn’t especially interested in the medicines that you’re taking, including over the counter drugs, and doesn’t have the time to spend finding out why you take all of those medicines, it’s probably time for you to take a walk to another doctor. Because there are some great primary care providers around Western
New York, why would you remain with a doctor who doesn’t respect
you as a competent adult and who doesn’t pay attention to the differences
in medical treatments that advancing age sometimes requires? Are you aware that geriatricians are physicians with special training in health care for the elderly? Are you aware that there are doctors and nurse practitioners who see their patients in their homes? Do you know that some of the geriatricians have a full complement of staff people who address many social as well as medical problems for their patients? Do you know there’s a geriatrician who practices alternative medicine? It’s possible that none of these folks is right for you, but it
certainly is true that your present doctor might not be right for
you either. That’s a shame, but it’s up to you to do something about
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