[0:00] We'll never show.

[0:13] Good morning.

[0:16] And welcome to beautiful old-or-ture beach. Our community is one in which it is proud of the place in which they live.

[0:25] And also our community is proud of its residents and those who call old-or-ture beach home.

[0:31] First of all, I'd like to thank staff for their help, Kim, our town clerk, who's doing the televised

[0:37] thing today. Pam, back there. Welcome in each of you, Fran, Diana, Bill Ddenado, and the police

[0:46] departments. So I'll head to say thank you to them. We start with the beach in the ocean, of course,

[0:51] but there is more than that. Oh yes, proximity to great dining and all-durchered, shopping, golfing, hiking,

[0:58] skiing, medical services and facilities, and track the juxtaport, the eastern trail, and less

[1:04] than a two-hour drive to Boston. Ensuring a bright future for all our children is a responsibility

[1:11] of our community and honoring and respecting those who have lived their lives here, bringing

[1:16] the sum of all their journeys and wealth of experience to benefit us all. We are honored to open

[1:22] our doors to AIOP today, knowing that we have fully committed ourselves to the age-friendly

[1:27] endeavor. We are particularly thrilled to age professor, Maryland, Blue G and I hope I said

[1:33] your lesson. That was perfect. I am 82 and I'm getting better with age. That's all I

[1:39] can say. We are particularly thrilled to have you here today and thank you for your graciousness

[1:46] in coming. Almost two years ago, a town manager came to my desk. By the way, I'm always

[1:52] read on the Assistant Tellman, a jury should have said it at the beginning.

[1:55] And he put on the AARP initiative, H. Friendly, on my desk, and said, quote,

[2:02] make it work.

[2:03] I read carefully the goals and objectives and realized I was in trouble.

[2:08] Then I thought, no, I'm not.

[2:10] Pat and Haleene, Bill of Doot, and I'll get the credit.

[2:15] Seriously, when you have a spiritual or community commitment, you get in front of you, those

[2:21] inspire you, who succeed because they believe in what they are doing. That is why the

[2:26] age-friendly endeavor has succeeded in old or to beat. We welcome you today. We invite you

[2:31] to use this opportunity to make the choice for joy to see the world with new eyes, open eyes,

[2:39] loving eyes, to choose compassion and understanding for ourselves, our family, our friends,

[2:46] our community for the whole world, to spread our wings and fly boldly, to give thanks for the rainbows and the butterflies, our symbols of renewal and rebirth.

[2:58] May I introduce Pat Brown and Helene Whitaker from Old Orchard, please stand. I don't know where Pat went. Oh, there she is back there.

[3:07] They are our facilitators, and I owe them a great deal.

[3:15] I also want to introduce the next speaker who's going to be Jeanne Saunders, but Jeanne is in charge of age-friendly in Saako.

[3:23] And she has been our personal inspiration since day one.

[3:27] You'd think we want to compete against Saako, wouldn't you?

[3:31] But instead of that, she has encouraged us, given us help and assistance, and we are very, very grateful.

[3:37] She's going to introduce our guests, but also I would like to introduce and welcome Mary and Lou, and I hope I say your name

[3:45] Mary, it would correctly.

[3:47] She'd love me.

[3:49] Have a little good.

[3:51] Thank you.

[3:52] May I introduce Dean Saunders.

[3:53] Let's give her a hand.

[4:00] Good morning and welcome to disrupting aging.

[4:04] So today we're going to learn about words and actions and how they matter.

[4:08] older age is often associated with disease and decline, and there's just really no good

[4:14] reason for that. Our society socially constructed it that way to age optimally. It is

[4:20] important to understand why our society use aging the way that it does, and what we can

[4:25] do about it. So today we'll begin to change the way we perceive age, how we age, and how

[4:32] we work with older adults. So to help us along this journey, I'd like to introduce Dr.

[4:37] Marilyn Goulucci, she is the daughter of a former first basement that would be her mother.

[4:45] She's the daughter of an exceptionally gifted cook that would be her father.

[4:50] And she has inherited fierce conscientiousness, unflagging optimism and only moderately bridal enthusiasm

[4:56] and we will experience all of that today.

[5:00] She's a professor and director of geriatric education and research

[5:03] at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine.

[5:07] Her goal in life is to change the world,

[5:10] wanting to affect change, so all embrace aging.

[5:14] So let's help we get started with that today.

[5:16] Welcome to Dr. G.

[5:18] Thank you.

[5:19] Thank you.

[5:24] More and more.

[5:25] Can you all hear me okay?

[5:27] All right.

[5:27] I wasn't quite sure.

[5:28] Sometimes this thing does something weird.

[5:31] So this is my high tech pointer.

[5:34] Be careful, because if you don't pay attention,

[5:39] That's what happens.

[5:41] Dean, thank you.

[5:42] Thank you so much for having me here.

[5:44] So, a beautiful day.

[5:46] We got spring coming.

[5:47] This is good news.

[5:49] Age friendly.

[5:50] All about it.

[5:51] Hopefully you know that Maine has the highest number of age-friendly communities

[5:55] in all the United States.

[5:57] That's pretty amazing.

[5:59] Some formal through ARP.

[6:01] Some less formal but still mighty.

[6:05] So that's a really good thing.

[6:06] I want to bring your attention to this, age-friendly university, the University of New England

[6:12] applied for international designation, it's out of Ireland, to be recognized as an age-friendly

[6:20] university.

[6:21] There are 10 principles that you need to kind of check into.

[6:25] It's pretty much the whoop to jump through to become an age-friendly community, it's similar

[6:29] when you're trying to come an age-friendly university.

[6:32] Well, we were the fifth university in the U.S. and the 11th internationally globally to get the age-friendly designation.

[6:46] So now there are over 50 colleges and universities worldwide that are age-friendly.

[6:53] We do not meet all 10 principles, so I've been chewing on other people's ginger snaps to try to get to those other 10.

[7:03] I have a little bit of an echo, everybody okay?

[7:06] All right, so let's move along.

[7:09] Let me just say, you know, we're talking about mindfulness today, and this is really not okay, but it's fun, right?

[7:18] So, I feel pretty schizophrenic in this age because I use a lot of things that are really

[7:23] not aged friendly, but we can laugh, so whatever.

[7:29] So I just want to give you a little bit of a background about some of the work that I do.

[7:34] This project, it's nursing home immersion.

[7:37] I started it in 2006, what I do is I admit medical students into nursing homes for two weeks

[7:45] to live the life of an elder resident.

[7:47] So they are being toileted.

[7:49] They're being bathed.

[7:49] They're in a wheelchair for two weeks.

[7:52] Some of them are living in dementia units.

[7:56] And the whole nine yards, just as if they were an older adult

[8:01] resident in an nursing home, that's the life that they live.

[8:05] Now, ironically, from this, you would think after two weeks

[8:08] that these students are just climbing the walls

[8:10] and ready to come out, and they don't want to.

[8:13] They want to stay.

[8:14] they have a hard time leaving. What do you think happens? Why is it that they want to stay

[8:20] in this environment that nobody wants to go into?

[8:25] They make friends. They connect hard to

[8:28] heart. They understand the community and the culture within that nursing home. And I don't care

[8:33] what nursing home it is. I had a student who was in the Chelsea soldiers home in Massachusetts

[8:38] in a 12-bed warg and had trouble leaving that home, you know, so it wasn't private room and

[8:47] lobster meals and all of that, you know, I mean, this was intense and yet that human connection,

[8:54] that heart-to-heart connection, that's really what I'm after. And that's the part where I say,

[8:59] my goal in life is to change the world so that people can feel more positively. This is one project

[9:04] that makes that happen.

[9:06] There's actually a CBS evening news story we weren't able to get sound, so we're going

[9:11] to have to pass that, but this has been on there wide everything.

[9:17] So the really cool part about this is University New England is the only university in the

[9:22] world doing this project.

[9:25] Why is it that we don't have other people doing this project?

[9:28] And then you're not going to believe this part.

[9:30] There is absolutely no money in this project.

[9:33] The homes will give up a bed in New York City at $600 a day, and they'll give up a bed.

[9:41] And Maine, it's about $300-350 depending on the home.

[9:45] They have the students stay there for two weeks, and the staff will treat that student exactly like a resident.

[9:51] So that's pretty amazing.

[9:53] And the only thing the students get out of this, they're volunteering for this project.

[9:57] They usually do it because they want to become better physicians.

[10:00] They want to make sure they're the best physician they could be.

[10:02] And the first student who did this in 2006 is OBGYN physician in Portland.

[10:08] It doesn't mean they're going into geriatrics.

[10:13] So, I was going to say something else, but I don't remember what it was, so it doesn't matter.

[10:18] Well, just pass.

[10:20] So, here was the video where I'll pass on that.

[10:23] And then what I did were, oh, the students, they get a research citation out of it.

[10:27] That's what they gave.

[10:28] And the same thing with this program, the hospital's home immersion,

[10:30] And those of you familiar with Gazzão Memorial Hospital?

[10:34] So I went knocking on their door and I said,

[10:36] you know, I got this idea.

[10:38] Maybe you might be interested.

[10:39] Would you take two of my students in on a weekend,

[10:43] Friday to Sunday, put them in a room,

[10:46] and have them part of the care team.

[10:48] Now, in the nursing home immersion,

[10:50] the students are actually recipients of care, right?

[10:54] But in the hospital, I mean,

[10:56] we can't put them in the dead.

[10:57] in a bed and say, please act like you're dying.

[11:00] That students don't understand that.

[11:03] So we have that part of the care team.

[11:05] So they work with the chaplain, social workers,

[11:07] the volunteers, nurse practitioners, nurses,

[11:11] certified nursingists all the way through.

[11:13] And this has been an amazing project.

[11:16] So two weeks ago, when I had students in the home,

[11:20] they had 10 deaths in 48 hours.

[11:23] And about as many admissions.

[11:25] Now, it's interesting that, you know, you get that kind of reaction for these students what they focused on were not the deaths,

[11:35] but the relationships that they created with the people who were dying and their families while they were there,

[11:42] and the care that they were able to provide.

[11:44] So this is the first time ever that you might have a physician in your future,

[11:53] Who knows how to toilet somebody, how to bathe somebody, how to turn somebody, how to sit and care with somebody.

[12:00] It's just, it's amazing.

[12:02] And I usually do it with second year students.

[12:05] Well, this past weekend, I had two fourth year students.

[12:09] And one of those students had a palliative care rotation,

[12:13] just, you know, like a month, four weeks doing palliative care.

[12:17] And the learning that these students had was just remarkable.

[12:22] They change after this, I definitely, I am changing the world just by putting these students

[12:28] in these odd environments where people would say, what are you kidding?

[12:32] But I'm doing it.

[12:33] So it's really fun.

[12:36] And the students are always surprised about how much laughter they have while they're in the home.

[12:41] After's the best medicine, right?

[12:44] So all you have is this moment.

[12:47] You've got to brace this moment, that's it, and that's what our students are learning.

[12:51] The part that I'm really key on is that for those two students I've had 10 deaths, what they found was that they became more and more present for each death.

[13:04] Where if they were in a hospital, they would become desensitized to that death. Do you hear the difference in that?

[13:12] To really be with the person and the family as compared to shutting it off and saying, I got to go to my next person.

[13:18] So we're trying to, and especially in osteopathic medicine where there should be more empathic,

[13:24] that's what we're working on.

[13:26] And then this is actually my paid research.

[13:28] A balancing act.

[13:29] So for any of you that feel a little wobbly from time to time,

[13:34] you want to get right on top of that.

[13:36] Everything is free for this program.

[13:39] If you just Google, you become UXL and go to a balancing act.

[13:44] There's videos on there.

[13:46] And also the manuals are on there.

[13:48] And if you feel that you want a manual in hand,

[13:52] you can call Amy and we only charge you the cost

[13:55] to print the manual it's $10.

[13:58] But all of it's online, it's all free,

[14:01] it has beginner, balance exercises, intermediate,

[14:05] advanced, and what we call advanced action,

[14:08] balance while you're moving.

[14:10] So anyone can try this balance program.

[14:14] It's a self-taught program.

[14:17] We designed it specifically for Maine,

[14:20] because Maine is the most rural state.

[14:22] You can't always go with a pitlock.

[14:25] They can't always go to a balance class somewhere.

[14:28] So we wanted to make sure to offer that option.

[14:32] And it was also approved for people who are blind

[14:36] and visually impaired.

[14:37] And we work with the Maine Center

[14:38] for the blind and visually impaired.

[14:40] So on the video, for example, you can't

[14:44] what I'm doing, but we know from working with people who are blind that the instructions

[14:50] that are given can be followed by people who can't see. Does that make sense? So we use people

[14:58] who have blind us too.

[15:00] Okay, so now we're going to play.

[15:06] Got it? Old broad jump? I know. It's one of those again. So really, what I'm going to do today is to share what you already know and understand, but actually I'm going to try to stretch your minds and we're definitely going to try to have fun. So if I was to say to you right now, what does our society say about older drivers?

[15:30] Our society, say about older drivers, dangerous, stop, watch out, okay, you've not even

[15:38] hesitating, and the people who are saying them are older for those in the ethernet out

[15:44] there.

[15:46] What does our society say about the personalities of older adults?

[15:52] You're not even hesitating.

[15:55] How many of you in your property?

[15:58] Come on.

[16:00] How many of you in your property?

[16:03] Now, what is interesting about this though, is that for some reason in our society and actually

[16:11] hopefully by the end you'll understand why this is, but that our society presumes that age is

[16:19] negative things, that you're sexless, that you can't drive, that you're

[16:23] crotchety, that you know whatever else it is. Well the truth of the matter is,

[16:27] especially in terms of personality, if you are crotchety when your older chances are

[16:31] you a crotchety when you were younger, you really think that you were going to

[16:36] change from who you were, to who you become in your older ages. Now even if there's

[16:45] major health insults. Now I'm going to be talking today mostly about people that have good

[16:51] cognition. So bear with me on that, okay. If you want to talk about dementia afterwards,

[16:55] I'm happy to do it. But there is this red thread that goes through your life and you become more

[17:03] of who you are and you become more different than the person next to you besides. So if you met one

[17:09] or don't even want to hold or don't.

[17:11] How many in this room are eager, not anxious to become 80, 90, 100?

[17:23] I've got a few takers.

[17:24] What happens when I ask this to an audience of 20 and 30-year-olds, you think?

[17:30] I might get one hand, which of course I grab that person and hug him right away, right?

[17:37] It's, we're anxious to become that old because our society has it, you'll see, what has

[17:46] it done to the field of aging?

[17:48] It just seems so negative.

[17:51] So we're going to, we're going to change that.

[17:53] Now this is where I'm going to get you to start thinking outside the box to set you up

[17:58] for the rest of the talk.

[18:00] I actually came into this field late.

[18:02] I was an exercise to theologist in a former life.

[18:06] So I didn't have the traditional disciplines

[18:08] behind me of sociology, biology, psychology.

[18:12] My colleagues across the country, across the world,

[18:15] many of them have those traditional backgrounds, okay?

[18:19] I didn't.

[18:21] So I came into the field and I'm saying,

[18:23] whoa, what is going on here?

[18:26] That people were accepting things that for me

[18:29] seen blatantly walk. Here's the first test. So here is an example of successful aging in the

[18:37] eight textbooks by Balthus and Balthus. Optimize the capacities that older people still have while

[18:45] compensating for inevitable losses. Do you like that definition of successful aging?

[19:01] Some,

[19:02] inevitable, right? What other word is in there that kind of wrinkles you?

[19:09] Phil, Phil, Phil, right? Like, you're amazing, you made, that's it. Right. So, now see, you

[19:17] would be great in the gerontology field, but colleagues that have those traditional disciplines

[19:23] behind them. Now, when all fairness, both of us and both of us are actually biologists. So, when

[19:31] They're talking about inevitable losses, they are talking about cell change.

[19:38] Now just because the risk cell change doesn't mean that it's going to show outwardly on

[19:42] anyone.

[19:44] It might, it might not, but, you know, that's fair.

[19:48] But what we've had set up in our society is that there's either successful or not, successful

[19:53] productive, not productive, optimal, not optimal.

[19:57] I mean, there's always this dichotomy of what's happening.

[20:01] So, let's try it again. Here's another definition of successful aging. Now, what was interesting about this definition.

[20:09] I was at the gerontological site of America. There's 5,000 researchers in aging at this conference.

[20:16] Mary Lou, have you been to that conference? You don't know.

[20:19] So, what happened was Jack Woe, who actually started the geriatric department at Harvard, started the geriatric department at Mount Sinai.

[20:29] I mean, this guy is little, but he's huge, you know, in the field.

[20:37] So he writes this book, successful aging in 1990, we all in the audience get a signed copy

[20:44] of this book.

[20:44] I'm like, wow, this is cool, right?

[20:48] No, here is the definition of successful aging.

[20:52] It is the ability to maintain three key behaviors or characteristics.

[20:56] One, low risk of disease-related disability, two, high mental and physical function, and three active engagement with life.

[21:06] What do you think of that definition?

[21:12] Main pain is like still.

[21:14] Do you like the definition?

[21:18] Why not?

[21:24] Some things are going to be out of control, but here's the question I have for you.

[21:28] If people do have disease or disease-related disability,

[21:35] can they still not be successful in one way or another?

[21:40] Are there ways to compensate for things that,

[21:43] I mean, I think that's the key in aging that is lost actually

[21:48] in the younger population that they don't realize the power of adjustment

[21:53] that we have adaptation and adjustment.

[21:56] Now, what made this so popular is that it is a macro definition, what I mean by that is this

[22:10] would help healthcare. This would cut cost, but come on folks. You know, we're not all Superman

[22:20] out there or superwoman or whatever name is, but, you know, there's things that happen

[22:25] and to me it seems like, I love, let me back up, I have friends who are in dementia

[22:32] units that are amazing and loving and feeling good. Now I know that dementia is very scary

[22:42] thing for a lot of people, right? We have to deal with depression and anxiety usually when

[22:48] somebody has dementia but I don't know what high mental function is. I'm not sure if I have

[22:57] it today. I'm not sure, you know. But who gets to this side of all this? This is very

[23:02] society based and it's evidently yes and yes and there's a lot of good things happening that

[23:10] are not evidence based. Thank you for raising that. So actually I had Jack come to one of my

[23:19] conferences to be a keynote speaker when I was president of the organization, I kind of

[23:25] cute on them a little bit.

[23:27] What are you doing with this?

[23:29] We had a good time.

[23:30] He made me pay for dinner though.

[23:34] Okay.

[23:35] So, here's the third one.

[23:39] The measures of successful aging are life satisfaction and sense of well being in the face of

[23:45] decline.

[23:46] These are two sociologists.

[23:48] friends of mine. What do you think?

[23:55] You get it, right? I went up to his

[23:59] Susan, Conkel, and Leslie Morgan. I went up to what is this? And they're like

[24:06] well, everybody declines.

[24:13] Those words off, right? What would be so hard about

[24:16] to say satisfaction, a sense of well-being, period?

[24:21] Okay, we're on the same page,

[24:22] I just wanted to make sure, but let me tell you something, you pick this up like that.

[24:29] These definitions are in textbooks and I don't know that the professors that are teaching

[24:35] are really paying attention to those nuances.

[24:39] This is the subliminal message that aging is about disease, decline, and withdrawal.

[24:45] And again, pretty soon I'll tell you why that is.

[24:48] So what about this definition?

[24:53] The successful aging is feeling in control

[24:56] and believing in what you do makes a difference.

[25:01] That could be anybody any cognitive

[25:03] doesn't matter, right?

[25:06] You know where this is from?

[25:08] You go, whatever.

[25:11] It's a marketing play.

[25:13] It's the same sharp series.

[25:17] So people in academia

[25:19] are locked into that disease, decline, withdrawal.

[25:24] That's, they've been co-opted to believe it.

[25:26] And here we have the staying sharp series of marketing tool.

[25:31] Looking at the positive, moving us towards the positive.

[25:36] So, this is powerful stuff, right?

[25:38] Okay, so this is a birthday card.

[25:41] Sorry for the guys in the world.

[25:44] Can you guess who's your age?

[25:46] So you're looking at the picture, right?

[25:47] Anybody ever seen this car?

[25:52] Can you guess?

[25:54] Can you get through to your age?

[25:55] It says, the gown and the urn.

[26:06] A chimney for me.

[26:20] Sense of humor about this.

[26:21] It's like, yeah, we're going to punch that friend probably.

[26:27] But this is what happens in our society.

[26:30] And how many times have you stood in card stores, reading cards,

[26:34] and you say, well, you know, this is a stare at me.

[26:37] got to get this my best friend you know and it's not very flattering. So let me get you

[26:43] down just some poor definitions so we're all on the same page. You know that woman.

[26:50] So here's the term geriatric geriatric is actually an adjective.

[27:02] It's still on here.

[27:07] I think I hit a button.

[27:10] All right, so, geriatric is an adjective.

[27:12] They often use the term geriatric in the definition.

[27:15] But here, I want to bring your attention to something

[27:19] with significant disorders.

[27:24] Okay, there's nothing positive of this.

[27:26] Individuals of being age, individual geriatric population,

[27:30] in a nursing home, right, geriatric depression, geriatric animals, and actually here is a geriatric

[27:38] animal. I found it this morning when I was walking in and I made sure to give it plenty

[27:44] room. It'll walk her pearls, you know? But I think come on, geriatric,

[27:58] in a, in

[27:58] I mean, who comes up with these things?

[28:01] But here's the thing with the term geriatric.

[28:05] That when I was hired at the University

[28:07] as director of geriatric education and research,

[28:12] instead of them, again, we put the S on geriatric

[28:14] to make it a now, because I do not want

[28:17] to be the director of education and research

[28:20] that has significant disorders.

[28:23] We have geriatric nurse practitioners.

[28:27] Those are clearly nurse practitioners with significant disorders, right?

[28:33] So this language thing is just so critical and then ask them to make the difference from changing it to an adjective to an noun.

[28:44] Especially if you look at the definitions that are in popular dictionaries.

[28:49] So then here the term geriatrics.

[28:52] I look this up.

[28:54] says, branch of medicine, let me get over here, dealing with diseases,

[29:01] debilities, problems of aging, problems specific to the age, slack, and all a person.

[29:13] Is there anything in that definition that makes you want to become older?

[29:19] This is even a black medical dictionary.

[29:26] This is really, this is a travesty, right?

[29:30] This is why I wouldn't everybody be concerned about their own aging when you look up and

[29:37] you see these kinds of things.

[29:40] Yes.

[29:59] All right.

[30:00] Okay, so one, we at least wanted to put the S on that, but we don't want that word used at all. That is terrible. Okay, so

[30:13] this is all negative based.

[30:17] And I mentioned I was president of a national organization, the Academy of Geological Sciences Higher Education, and it was a two-year presidency.

[30:25] And the first thing I did when I came in was I got everybody together, these, there are international members of part of this organization.

[30:33] This is Passeg.

[30:35] What we did was work as an organization.

[30:38] This is the acronym AG for the organization.

[30:42] With any year, this is what we came up with.

[30:45] The study of health and disease and later like,

[30:49] Was it so hard for us to put that word health in there?

[30:52] It was easy. It was the first thing that came out of everybody's mouth.

[30:56] When are we going to be looking at the health of older adults rather than just the problems and the diseases?

[31:01] Then the comprehensive health care of older person.

[31:05] Now we're talking about that broader piece that we are not unidimensional.

[31:10] We have our emotional needs, our spiritual needs, our physical needs, our cognitive needs.

[31:16] We are complex.

[31:18] And we need to, and that's why I love osteopathic medicine because what we're trying to teach our students is to look at the whole person in their context and figure out for that person, what's happening for them and how to give them the opportunity to provide optimal quality of life based on their own definition.

[31:39] And then, this last part, we actually found someplace else that we all liked that.

[31:44] The well-being of their informal caregivers, now, who were the informal caregivers?

[31:51] Family, friends, right?

[31:53] Could be anybody?

[31:54] I took care of a 83-year-old in across the street, the longer daughter was away, I was fine,

[31:59] happy to do that, and then you took family of choice, right?

[32:05] So, this part here, of course, is incredibly important, because if the person who is working

[32:11] with the older adult, on care, then definitely, if I'm doing it, I need to be balanced.

[32:21] I need to be solid, need to be grounded, I need to be rested, because as soon as I'm off

[32:28] my game, that is going to affect the other person, right?

[32:33] Now, what happens in your mind when you see care partner compared with care

[32:39] giver?

[32:45] It's mutual, right?

[32:47] Thank you for that.

[32:49] Yeah.

[32:49] And yet, when you have care giver, it almost sounds like the person who is the recipient of

[32:56] care has no say and is not involved.

[32:59] That's part of that, those nuances of reframing.

[33:03] Additionally, you have the term geriatric.

[33:09] If I take this off here, you have the term geriatric.

[33:14] Another derogatory term that's used geriatric is an adjective.

[33:19] What happens when you hear elder leaf?

[33:25] When you hear elder leaf, what comes to mind?

[33:28] Is anybody in this room elderly?

[33:31] That was a lovely question. Trust me, you are not elderly.

[33:39] And capacitated that, why? If you're an elder, you would at least have a chance to have some wisdom, right? You're an elder.

[33:49] So actually, what we're trying to do in terms of reframing aging is to have older adults refer to as either older persons, older adults, you know, older people.

[33:58] I'll use elders from time to time, but that's even, you know, we're getting nervous about

[34:08] elders, because not everybody's on the same page in terms of the wisdom of the elder.

[34:12] But elderly, like caregivers, really diminishes the capacity of the older adult just by nature

[34:22] of using those words.

[34:25] Okay?

[34:26] Does that help?

[34:27] You good?

[34:29] So here we have older adults equals geriatric population. Do you think those terms are synonymous?

[34:38] Is it okay to refer to older adults as geriatric?

[34:45] Okay, so that's a no. Good for you.

[34:50] And really, older adults are the survivors.

[34:53] You know, they're the ones adapting to just being in moving forward and making things work.

[34:57] So can you imagine,

[35:02] we have 16 health professions programs at the University of New England.

[35:07] We have Mary Lou myself and a few others that are aware.

[35:12] And so whenever our students talk about geriatric patient, but it's in my geriatric patient,

[35:18] I take care of the geriatric population, I just kick them in the knee.

[35:21] This is not okay, you know, and to get those students and they're out on these six-week

[35:30] three-week clerkships and hospitals to say to those students, do not let the people who are teaching

[35:36] you your attendings use these terms, stand up to them.

[35:41] That's a lot of a student, right, because the other person's grading, they have a power position,

[35:46] but I'm just so hoping.

[35:49] So here we have the path of aging and you all probably know now that we have, as of January 2011, the baby boomer started coming in, we went from 6,000 people a day turning 65 to 10,000 people a day turning 65.

[36:04] We have 15,000 people a day turning 55. So I have job security for the next I think 35 years.

[36:13] So, actually, I became a gerontologist, so I wouldn't have to retire, so working into my hundreds would be perfectly fine for me.

[36:20] In terms of nursing homes, if I ask our students, what percentage of older adults live in nursing homes, what do you think they say?

[36:28] What percentage?

[36:30] 100 percent?

[36:34] Pretty high percentage, though.

[36:35] On average, students will say 40 percent of older adults are living in nursing homes.

[36:40] Now, if we have about 250,000 older adults in May, we have only 7,000 nursing home beds.

[36:47] So it's not going to be 50% on average across the US of 65 and older is about 5% living

[36:54] in nursing homes.

[36:57] So in terms of grandparents, poor, in 10, grandparents are the primary care providers of

[37:04] their grandchildren.

[37:06] So when I have, this is primary care provider, okay, so there's, I think, six, six or seven that are in the homes of children and maybe not primary but assistant.

[37:20] So when I am talking with health professional students and hey, say I'm going to shut off, I don't need to listen to Dr. G, you know, because I'm working with kids.

[37:29] Well, let me tell you, when those children come in with their grandparents, if those physicians

[37:36] cannot ensure that the grandparents are stable and okay, what happens to the child in that

[37:43] case?

[37:44] Right?

[37:45] They're going to end up in foster care or who knows where they're going to end up.

[37:48] So I don't care what profession you're in, you will always be working with older adults.

[37:54] and so being an age-friendly university, trying to get all our health profession students to embrace

[38:00] that aging is natural, that it happens, it will happen to that student, if that student is lucky,

[38:08] and to embrace it rather than run away from it.

[38:11] Cariatricians happen to have the highest happiness quotients of all specialties.

[38:16] Do you have any idea which medical specialty has the lowest happiness quotient, just throw out some things?

[38:22] It's like I treat no.

[38:26] I'm talking medical.

[38:29] But palliative care?

[38:30] No.

[38:32] No.

[38:34] Nutrition.

[38:36] Nutrition.

[38:37] Obes.

[38:39] Obes.

[38:39] Obes, GYN, has the lowest happiness quotient.

[38:43] Now, I don't know.

[38:43] Maybe if you were working with all those hormonal women, you might feel the same.

[38:47] I'm not sure.

[38:48] But really what it gets down to are the hours and the lawsuits.

[38:52] And OB-GYNs really have a low impact, but geriatricians love their older adult patients.

[38:58] They learn something new, they enjoy the relationships with them, and so this both well.

[39:04] And if you have an official physician who really enjoys a good mystery, get an older adult

[39:13] in front of you, because it's not straightforward what's going on.

[39:16] There's usually complicated factors that you really have to figure out.

[39:20] So, average number of physicians on average, especially now, are primary care when you see your general practitioner.

[39:28] It's rare that your general practitioner will stay with you and really work through what it is you're going through.

[39:32] Chances are right away, they're going to send you to a specialist.

[39:36] Just like that.

[39:37] That wasn't the way it was.

[39:38] We remember what it wasn't that way.

[39:40] So, what happens now is that, oh, grew belts, could be any adult, has between five and seven physicians.

[39:48] when they're healthy. If an older adult goes into a hospital, which

[39:53] or an average is 4 to 4.5 days in a hospital, they will see between 12 and 14

[40:00] different physicians. Now you know there's electronic medical records, right?

[40:05] Every that's supposed to take care of everything. It doesn't matter. There's still

[40:09] issues in terms of polypharmacy, drug drug interactions. You know, if you're on

[40:15] For drugs, there's going to be at least a 25% chance of interaction if you're on six drugs.

[40:21] There's going to be 50% chance of interaction.

[40:23] And let me tell you something here.

[40:25] Those ear visits?

[40:27] 70% of older adults who go into the emergency room.

[40:31] It's because of the last known prescription they were given by a healthcare provider.

[40:41] 70%.

[40:43] That's a lot.

[40:44] So, we really need to be mindful one about our own bodies to know ourselves, trying not to, you know,

[40:51] take on all these meds without really understanding what's going on.

[40:55] Talk to other physicians, talk to a pharmacist.

[40:59] That's the best.

[41:00] Take your elbows, take your over the counter, take your prescriptions, go into the pharmacy and say,

[41:05] what do I have here, what do I need, what don't I need?

[41:09] Because chances are, even with two meds, there could be interaction.

[41:13] Everybody give it that? This is pretty amazing stuff, right, and it's so cool because I get emails from our medical students

[41:20] Dr. Gee, I just took care of this older woman today a week and I was the one that figured out it was because the last

[41:27] No medication she got. You know, they're out there. They're thinking they're doing it, so that's really good. All right, we're doing okay. You okay? You're good?

[41:35] Okay. Well, make sure. So here we go. Do we all age the same?

[41:41] All right, so you're answering which age do you mean my anatomic psychological physiologic wall or cryologic?

[41:48] You've got all these ways of, you know, you are not boring people.

[41:52] Let's go back to that question again.

[41:54] Do you all age the same? You all said no.

[41:58] Try it again. Do you all age the same?

[42:02] Do we all age?

[42:05] Yes.

[42:06] Yes.

[42:06] What? What? Somebody said yes.

[42:08] Okay. Did you just say yes or do you have a reason?

[42:15] Yes. And that way we do. I actually

[42:18] tricked you. So good for you for thinking outside the box. That was good. That was good.

[42:25] So actually,

[42:28] if I said how do we all age the same, that would have been a whole lot easier

[42:32] for you. And how old age the same is? Day of the time, a year of the time we all have a birthday

[42:37] year, you know, I had no goal in city with sick years, so we missed a birthday, but you know,

[42:42] I don't, I said it was same age to year. I was actually 47, 2 years in a row. I'm not sure what happened there.

[42:51] But really that we're, do we all age the same? We actually,

[42:55] Cines, when you answer it is, do we all cines the same? That physiologic change. It's very, very different.

[43:02] So if I line up 10, 85-year-olds, they will all be very heterogeneous in physiology and function in all sorts of ways.

[43:10] If I line up 10, 12-year-olds, they'll all pretty much be the same, different personalities, but they will be physiologically fairly the same.

[43:18] So let's get into some concepts here.

[43:24] So if you're construction and disengagement theory, this is where the rubber hits the row.

[43:29] Let me ask you.

[43:30] Would you all be comfortable doing some wars this morning?

[43:36] Some wars, you know get you know how to do arm wrestling?

[43:41] Do you know how to use some wrestling or some wars?

[43:47] Yeah, do you have a you have a here please?

[43:53] Your van at today.

[43:57] There's a reason for this

[43:59] Actually, I was a coaching a former life volleyball across and I found that with audiences that if I hit them

[44:05] can aesthetically, experientially, auditory, you hear my voice,

[44:09] and visually, you see the slides.

[44:11] I can usually shift here a little bit.

[44:14] On one of those things.

[44:15] So we want to do some wrestling, or some wars.

[44:20] Oh, God.

[44:22] And she has long nails.

[44:25] So we want to do some wars.

[44:26] What is the objective of the game?

[44:28] What are you supposed to do?

[44:30] It's supposed to win, she says.

[44:32] So I'm supposed to try it out.

[44:33] which is, which is acting, possibly.

[44:42] Okay, so, I'm going to have you for 15 seconds,

[44:46] pair up and do some wrestling from worst.

[44:51] The object is to pin the other person's thought.

[44:54] Now, in 15 seconds, the one you could count,

[44:57] to see how many pins you can possibly get in 15 seconds.

[45:00] Okay? So, here's the thing. If you are of the old school, and you got one, two, three, four, right? Play out some more, five, six, seven, then you've already lost five seconds. You know, so to get. So, you can't put, then you're going to just say it real quick in your head, all right? So, let me just make sure you have pairs for those of you that are comfortable doing it.

[45:26] You want to turn around, do a body?

[45:33] Okay.

[45:44] All right, ready?

[45:44] Come,

[45:49] go, get as many pins as you can, go!

[46:17] If you get that,

[46:27] they're both turning red in the face.

[46:30] Okay, how many gouts in pin?

[46:32] How many gouts?

[46:34] How many gouts?

[46:35] How many gouts?

[46:37] How many gouts?

[46:39] Whoa!

[46:40] Will you be in nice?

[46:42] How many gouts?

[46:43] 5.

[46:44] 20 gouts.

[46:44] You got them all?

[46:46] How come?

[46:47] What happened to you?

[46:48] You got bigger thumbs?

[46:50] You got bigger thumbs?

[46:50] Did anybody draw blood?

[46:52] No.

[46:52] So, Jean, I need you up here.

[46:57] Come on Jean.

[46:59] So the goal.

[47:00] Object.

[47:01] Pin the question's thumb.

[47:02] Goal.

[47:03] Get as many pins as you possibly can.

[47:05] And if we were to follow the goal.

[47:07] She pins me.

[47:08] I pin her.

[47:09] Oh, you cheated.

[47:12] Get as many pins as you possibly can.

[47:16] And 15 seconds.

[47:18] We could probably get.

[47:19] Yeah.

[47:20] We can get a lot, right?

[47:22] Oh, my God.

[47:23] Right?

[47:23] So, okay, wait, now, here's the key.

[47:27] Fun wrestling was designed to be what?

[47:29] Jean said it right in the beginning.

[47:31] Competitive, right?

[47:32] And when you smash the other person's thumb,

[47:35] then it really feels good.

[47:36] Well, let me tell you, when I went up to Jean,

[47:39] I said, Jean, we're gonna shift this a little bit.

[47:41] You know, the goal is to get as many pens as we possibly can.

[47:45] So, I'm gonna pin you, you pin me, you know,

[47:48] she wouldn't let go of my thumb.

[47:50] So, I'm trying to say, Jean, let go of my thumb.

[47:53] So I can pin you, you know, but she's already down that path of this is competitive

[47:59] when I smash your thumb, it's really fun for me, right?

[48:03] So what is that?

[48:05] What is that?

[48:06] That happens to be this social construction of reality, burger enlightenment, 1956.

[48:15] Two people get together, bear with me, this is something to do with age.

[48:18] Two people get together, they decide something is so, right?

[48:23] And then my cousin, boy, comes in and she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that.

[48:28] And then G comes and she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

[48:31] But then Ted comes and he's like, no, no, no, I don't, I mean, but we already have five

[48:36] of six of us that are moving this train down the track and we just bowl over ten, say, no,

[48:43] you know, you're the naysayer, we're just moving this way.

[48:45] Do you know where Thumwors came from, Thumwors?

[48:51] 1944, Bernard David Sin, with his grandson, what was going on in 44?

[48:59] Yeah, World War II.

[49:01] And so what he said to his grandson was, there is so much killing and maiming going on.

[49:07] I want people to hold hands and I want them to have fun and he created the game of Thumwors.

[49:15] Now there's no evidence base, there's no research on this, but what is it about some wars that I can present in Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Norway, Finland, some place else?

[49:37] They're all able to do some wars, at least 95% of the people in the audience know what some wars is.

[49:47] From Bernard and his grandson in the US, to across the world, people know how to do some wars.

[49:57] What is that about? This right here, social construction.

[50:03] They created something that got other people interested in it and it just grew and built and moved.

[50:11] This is exactly what happened with the field of aging.

[50:17] Disease declined withdrawal. Why?

[50:21] 1961.

[50:23] First theory of functional and successful aging.

[50:27] This engagement theory does this engagement sound positive to you.

[50:32] Actually, what the theory states, it is mutually beneficial for the elderly to disengage from society and society to disengage from the elderly.

[50:44] It is gradual, it is inevitable.

[50:51] In this case, what is the ultimate disengagement?

[50:56] So, if you really want to age functionally and successfully die, essentially that's what

[51:04] that theory is saying.

[51:05] Now, this theory, by coming from Henry, has been debunked, but I will tell you something.

[51:11] It is still in textbooks today.

[51:15] There are people who are teaching about the field of aging who are not really mindful

[51:20] of the nuances of it, and don't know that this engagement theory is no longer viable.

[51:26] It actually has moved to zero transcendence, transcending societal paradigms.

[51:32] Look up large torn stem, zero transcendence, it's really cool.

[51:35] So that part is amazing.

[51:36] Now let me tell you something about this engagement theory.

[51:39] When I was doing my doctoral program, I just really have trouble with this theory.

[51:44] This is not good.

[51:46] And my colleagues are like, what's a theory?

[51:48] What do you want?

[51:48] I was like, no, no, this is not good.

[51:52] We got to bring some of this to life.

[51:55] Well, I did a whole deep search on the methods for this theory.

[51:59] And in short, what I found out was that they changed the method

[52:03] but going through because they thought people who were doing it was survey.

[52:07] They thought people who were in their 40s doing the survey would be fine

[52:10] but people in their 70s and 80s would get tired

[52:12] and so they changed the survey.

[52:15] Well, the other thing was that this theory was solidified based on the outcomes of 279 people.

[52:25] Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a lot to me across the U.S. even in 1960.

[52:31] So, then I keep reading and I say, oh, this is about Americans.

[52:36] What do they mean by middle Americans? You know, middle socioeconomic, middle education, what do they mean?

[52:40] And as I keep reading I find out, no, these are 279 people from Kansas City, the middle of America.

[52:50] You have got to be kidding me.

[52:53] Now, there are a few people that know that this theory only has 279 people that have helped form the theory

[53:01] that it has methodology flaws, and that it's about middle Americans who happen to be from Kansas City.

[53:07] So you have all those people out there reading this engagement theory in textbooks, say, and if it's in a textbook, it must be subtle.

[53:15] Now, the thing about this engagement theory that I'm very aware of is that it's in textbooks, and like fun wars has spread.

[53:29] What happens to the older adults who are now aging?

[53:32] They believe it must be so, disease, the kind withdrawal came right from the spirit.

[53:40] Disch you, believe it then, but it's true.

[53:45] Look at this face, with this face like you, it wouldn't, it wouldn't, I know, it's just amazing.

[53:53] But due for those of you that are writing things down, look up Lars Tornstamm, Gerro Transcendence

[53:57] Waco.

[53:58] Start and move forward.

[53:59] Can you tell the last name please?

[54:01] Tornt 10, T, O, R, N, Tornt 10, T, T, O, R, N, S, T, A, M, sorry, I had to think.

[54:09] Okay, so now that these are some of the, these are societal concepts, the medical students

[54:17] that she got stuck there, that's not the truth, that's not true.

[54:22] I'm guessing she was a dancer at some point and just managed to keep up with that, with

[54:28] regardless of age. So, you know, here's swimming a mile and then you stop for a year for whatever

[54:35] or reason and then you go back in the pool and you try to swim a mile and then you find out

[54:39] you're dying, you know, you can't breathe. And then the first thing you say to yourself is,

[54:43] wow, have I got an old in a year? No, you have not got an old. You've gotten decondition and you can

[54:48] work back up. So she happened to just kind of keep that going. So here, social clock, the age

[54:55] which things are supposed to happen according to society.

[55:01] So this is not supposed to happen according to society.

[55:04] But here we have, in with this pajama body.

[55:08] I'm not plotting your direction

[55:11] and trying to turn off the lights.

[55:15] Now, this is that part about that when people get older,

[55:20] especially younger adults and younger health care providers,

[55:23] think they become sexless, right? Or a sexual. And that is not necessarily true. And there's

[55:30] a couple things about this that is really important. One is that intercourse and orgasm may not

[55:38] be as important as you age, but that closeness, that physical, emotional intimacy may be. And

[55:45] just being close to somebody on the couch is sometimes just the most wonderful thing in the world.

[55:51] So, we, again, adapt and adjust to be more congruent with who we are inside, as compared

[55:58] to, believe it or not, when you're younger, you're definitely into performance mode.

[56:03] And you kind of drop off some of that performance need.

[56:06] The other thing is that, not everybody feels that way because we have a rise of STD and AIDS

[56:13] on the 65 plus population in Florida because of what they call the condo-casinotes.

[56:19] So these are the men and condominiums that are jumping from condo to condo, they're not worried about getting the woman they're having sex with pregnant, but they are pressing along STDs and AIDS actually.

[56:36] So sexual history, we're trying to get all of our health professions students to really be mindful of sexual history.

[56:42] And to think more broadly about how sex is defined, okay? So here's another one.

[56:48] Wake up, the cat's got UT, so what we expect in our society is that we become very fragmented.

[56:58] You know, we have physicians for every single part of your body inside and out.

[57:04] We are no longer whole beings.

[57:07] You know, when I mentioned we could go to a primary care and we could be treated as a whole person.

[57:13] No, we still get fragmented because we get and sent out to all these different doctors.

[57:18] So in terms of the social clock, it is expected that different parts of you will fall apart or fade away or whatever they do.

[57:27] I don't know, but we've got to change that.

[57:29] And then this last one, look at Dom size.

[57:34] That's the part about them being...

[57:37] That's the part about them being terrible drivers.

[57:39] So I have this really I do talks on sex and aging and I have this wonderful one

[57:46] there's older couple cartoons sitting on the couch and and he has his hand in

[57:50] her sweater and she says they're not up there anymore so all right so we're

[58:02] coming in here there's whole refraining everything that you do you have the

[58:07] choice to decide how you want to view it.

[58:10] Do you want to view it as negative?

[58:15] This is happening to me and it's about me

[58:19] or can you kind of broaden that a little bit?

[58:22] Well, I just did this little thing.

[58:25] I wanted to know what Crow's feet look like.

[58:32] I'm a good gold Crow's feet.

[58:35] I cannot tell you how many pictures came up like this.

[58:42] What I wanted to see were birds feet.

[58:47] I wanted to see what a crow's foot look like.

[58:52] Not an older doll's eyeballs.

[58:57] But even Google has been co-opted.

[59:00] Right? I mean you're putting a crow's feet like that.

[59:02] So then I'm thinking, what do I put in crow's the bird feet?

[59:07] And then I got this.

[59:09] Now how attractive is that?

[59:13] So how do you feel knowing that you have close feet?

[59:17] When, I think, you know, it's like they've used it because you're laughing or some good reason.

[59:23] So in terms of reframing and please pass this along to yourselves and to others,

[59:29] we are no longer doing that. We are going to have peacock feathers.

[59:39] I didn't have any trouble, I put up peacock feathers, I got peacock feathers.

[59:43] But hopefully someday we could change that.

[59:47] It's coming from a side.

[59:48] This is a bumper sticker, I'm so old that whenever you eat out, they ask me for my money up front.

[59:55] We're used to these things.

[59:56] If you haven't read the book by Betty for Dan,

[1:00:00] It's a fountain of age from 1996. It's a seminal work. It's still applies. It's a washingful book. I love her sense of humor. She was the one that came up with the term, compassionate ageism.

[1:00:14] Compassionate ageism is when you're assisting an adult with good intentions.

[1:00:19] Or assisting anybody really, if you don't do the ages, but here's the part.

[1:00:24] really think about how your actions are motivated, what are they motivated by, do you see in

[1:00:33] your mind an elderly man in the grocery store, having trouble reaching for something, you

[1:00:40] go over and say, I'll get that for you,

[1:00:45] first you got elderly in your mind, so you think

[1:00:47] they're not able, and then you're acting on that.

[1:00:54] This is the part where we just really, really need to be mindful.

[1:01:00] When you assist anyone, one do you ask first?

[1:01:04] And even that you're asking, are you asking because you think the person can't manage the task on his or her own?

[1:01:11] So, something to think about.

[1:01:13] We do it.

[1:01:13] You know, I've had the students say,

[1:01:16] No, you know, Dr. Jigan, I'm just friendly.

[1:01:19] I'm just like helping people. I help all people.

[1:01:22] Well, then you're co-dependent, right?

[1:01:24] I mean, let's get some good boundaries here

[1:01:27] and stay with yourself and move forward,

[1:01:30] but really to be mindful.

[1:01:33] That's what I'm asking for is just mindfulness.

[1:01:35] And I know I gave you a lot of information today.

[1:01:38] And right here, nurses, or have nursing in their family.

[1:01:43] Bonnie, you know this.

[1:01:45] Learn helplessness is from the nursing profession.

[1:01:48] It's actually when you're assisting others

[1:01:49] to the point where they know what longer can

[1:01:51] or no longer will do something.

[1:01:54] So let me just give you an example.

[1:01:56] My students are living in the nursing home for two weeks, right?

[1:01:59] They're sitting at the dinner table.

[1:02:01] Edmo's next door.

[1:02:02] The certified nursing assistant comes up and starts

[1:02:05] cutting Edmo's meat and preparing her coffee.

[1:02:07] And all of that, and the student looked at Edmo's,

[1:02:10] says, Edmo, you could do all that yourself.

[1:02:12] Why are you letting staff do it?

[1:02:14] And Edmo says, it makes her feel better.

[1:02:19] Now, the truth of the matter is, you know,

[1:02:21] The student's kind of looking for plaques.

[1:02:23] The truth of the matter is, Edna is going to lose the ability to do those things.

[1:02:27] Because she's going to let other people do them all the time for her.

[1:02:32] Now, this gets, this is so interesting because this is not associated with older adults.

[1:02:40] I have a friend who is an elementary school teacher.

[1:02:44] And one day, she said to the kids, no one else, I put on your coats, your boots, your hats,

[1:02:49] Go outside and play for recess, and she had three children sitting there not knowing how to buckle the boots or how to zip up their chickens.

[1:02:59] Now chances are they live either in a family with both parents working or one parent working and what happens.

[1:03:07] You throw all that on the kid and you're shutting them out of the door so they even get to work on time.

[1:03:13] That's learned helplessness. Those children don't know how to do that.

[1:03:17] Now, when you're alive, who always makes the coffee, who always writes the checks, who always takes care of the car, who changes the flat tire, who, you know, whatever, I could just list

[1:03:26] I'd am after I'd am after I'd am after I'd am, and then if there's somebody in your household that, that you have created this relationship with and something happens with that person,

[1:03:37] where are you?

[1:03:39] God, I really don't know where these things are, I don't know how to do this, go ahead.

[1:03:46] Yes,

[1:03:53] they're perplexed, they don't know what to do, very disadvantage, it's an an an an

[1:03:57] essence, no-plow parents, it's learned helplessness.

[1:04:00] Thank you for bringing that up.

[1:04:02] Good?

[1:04:03] Right?

[1:04:04] So think about your own lives.

[1:04:06] Make sure even if you don't want to do it, at least know how to do it.

[1:04:11] At least not.

[1:04:12] Is it better to say, do you need help or do you want help?

[1:04:17] Would you, can I assist you? Is there anybody I can assist you?

[1:04:22] Yeah, need.

[1:04:24] No, right? It's made you.

[1:04:25] That's kind of a heavy word.

[1:04:29] You know, and hold that thought.

[1:04:31] Because I'll get to that just second.

[1:04:34] All right.

[1:04:34] So, here we have Madame Colmett.

[1:04:36] She got at the age of 122.

[1:04:40] Say who?

[1:04:43] Oh, she, this is from 1997's.

[1:04:46] So I don't think she was disputed.

[1:04:49] Yeah, she definitely, they said,

[1:04:51] when her famous quote, I only have one wrinkle

[1:04:53] and I'm sitting on it.

[1:05:00] They're really cool part about Faddam calm that.

[1:05:03] Well, let me just tell you a little bit about it.

[1:05:06] So she smoked until the age of 19.

[1:05:10] Her physician actually said to Faddam calm that,

[1:05:12] I think she should stop smoking.

[1:05:14] And I'm thinking at a hundred and nineteen,

[1:05:15] you stop smoking the shock of not smoking

[1:05:17] is probably going to kill you, right?

[1:05:18] So what they had, you know, but actually she did stop smoking on her own because around that age,

[1:05:26] she was blind or got macular regeneration and had trouble seeing and she didn't want to ask for help

[1:05:31] and she didn't want to put other people at risk. So she made the decision to stop smoking.

[1:05:36] She was writing her bike all around all's friends to thank everybody for coming to our 100th birthday party.

[1:05:41] She went into a nursing home about the age of 110. She used to eat 2 pounds of chocolate a week.

[1:05:47] I like this woman, he said, the men pours away, you know Harry Potter, and she was known

[1:05:53] for her unflapability, she was sharp as a tack the day that she died, and she absolutely

[1:05:58] had no family whatsoever.

[1:06:00] Now, the really cool story about Madame Calment is that when she was 95, there was this attorney

[1:06:07] who came up to her and said, Madame Calment, I will gladly pay you, 2,500 francs a month,

[1:06:15] which at that time was about $450.

[1:06:18] I would pay you $2,500 for you apartment.

[1:06:22] You can continue living in your apartment,

[1:06:24] and when you die, then your apartment will be mine.

[1:06:29] So think about, she's 95.

[1:06:31] We used to say to people at 95,

[1:06:33] don't buy green bananas, right?

[1:06:34] You know, we'd say all these weird things.

[1:06:37] But if she had family, what do you think her adult children

[1:06:40] would have said to that deal?

[1:06:43] Don't do it, right?

[1:06:44] And he's going to make a killing on this place.

[1:06:47] Well, you know what happened?

[1:06:49] He was 45 at the time.

[1:06:50] He died at the age of 72.

[1:06:53] She's still living.

[1:06:55] And his family ends up paying more than double the market value

[1:06:59] on that apartment.

[1:07:01] That is a cool story.

[1:07:03] That's her unflapability.

[1:07:05] That's the essence of who she was.

[1:07:07] And some other fun quotes from her on her 123rd day.

[1:07:12] When asked what kind of future did she expect, she replied,

[1:07:17] a very short one.

[1:07:20] And then, when a person took leave by saying to her until next year, perhaps she retorted,

[1:07:26] I don't see why not. You don't look so bad.

[1:07:30] Now, what's great about that is she was blind at this time.

[1:07:35] So, you got a moment. This is that essence that

[1:07:40] that comes through, that our students see in the nursing home when they're living there for two weeks.

[1:07:45] That sense of humor, that ability to rise above.

[1:07:50] How many of us, because of what society says, that by the time you're 120 and you're having a birthday,

[1:07:56] you're thinking, oh, crap, I'm just wondering what am I going to be here?

[1:07:58] Like, let's get those over with.

[1:08:00] But no, she loved life.

[1:08:03] And I just love how she embraced it.

[1:08:05] Which brings us to this, the Orange Theory.

[1:08:08] When you have an orange and you squeeze it, what comes out, this is not a true question.

[1:08:14] Juice, right.

[1:08:15] There's a matter when you squeeze it, if you squeeze it in the morning, if you squeeze it in the afternoon, you squeeze it in the night.

[1:08:19] What comes out?

[1:08:20] There's a matter what you squeeze it with, if you squeeze it with your hand, a juicer.

[1:08:25] Even if you hit it with a hammer, it's going to be messy, but what comes out?

[1:08:29] Juice.

[1:08:29] Okay, so here's the metaphor.

[1:08:31] When Madame Calmedha got squeezed her unflapability came out, it's her juice.

[1:08:41] When you get squeezed, what is your juice?

[1:08:45] Is it anger?

[1:08:47] Is it irritability?

[1:08:48] Is it love?

[1:08:49] Is it optimism?

[1:08:50] Is it pessimism?

[1:08:51] Is it fear?

[1:08:53] Why is it that comes out when you get squeezed?

[1:08:57] Now, when you were a child, or when I was a child, under a lightning storm, scared the

[1:09:05] beginning of that, I mean, they were just scary, right? You're four or five years old? I love

[1:09:11] thunder and lightning storms now, as long as I'm not under a tree. I'm all I'm good. So

[1:09:17] you juice can change. When you know what your juice is, what do you want to do with it? Is

[1:09:24] at the juice you want to keep, what do you want to adapt that juice, and maybe change it.

[1:09:30] And what will happen, this is continuity theory, actually, this is width, width, the

[1:09:34] growth through your life, we are dynamic beings.

[1:09:37] If a thunder and lightning storm happens now, and I react to a fear, I'm conscious of that,

[1:09:43] and I change that, I don't need to be fearful, I'm okay, I'm safe.

[1:09:49] And that's continuity, how we can be dynamic through that.

[1:09:52] But think about your first reaction.

[1:09:55] That is your juice.

[1:09:57] And for physicians who oftentimes will do the squeezing,

[1:10:04] they should be aware of the juice of the person

[1:10:06] that they're working with.

[1:10:08] But first, they have to be aware of their own juice.

[1:10:12] You have to know yourself first before you

[1:10:14] can work with other people.

[1:10:16] So next time you feel squeezed by somebody,

[1:10:18] you say, listen, I got juice all over the place there.

[1:10:21] Let me just regroup here for a second and figure out what you don't want to see her.

[1:10:26] But this theory, I think, is really, it's a metaphor, but I think it's right on.

[1:10:31] So, words do matter.

[1:10:35] That is not my damn call, Matt, but I think she probably wouldn't be that way.

[1:10:42] So, communication pie chart gets back to your point.

[1:10:46] read or want. Only 7% is communicated with words. 93% with voice tone and body language.

[1:10:56] Would you say that I am passionate about this field?

[1:11:01] What gave it away?

[1:11:04] Now, let me tell you something here. I could have come here today.

[1:11:10] I am so excited about the field of aging.

[1:11:17] After three hours of listening to me speak,

[1:11:20] I'm sure you will feel just as passionate, as I do.

[1:11:28] You've had lectures like this.

[1:11:33] They think their words matter.

[1:11:37] Choose the matter as you remember what I said.

[1:11:39] I know you're not going to remember what I said.

[1:11:42] I've had people come up to me and say,

[1:11:44] oh, oh, oh, oh, you spoke at something.

[1:11:49] Oh, you were so good.

[1:11:50] I don't even know what you spoke about.

[1:11:54] I'll take the compliment.

[1:11:55] It's okay.

[1:11:56] You don't need to know what I talked about.

[1:11:59] But that's what happens, right?

[1:12:01] I mean, it's only this.

[1:12:03] And yet we spend so much time on words.

[1:12:05] So need or want?

[1:12:07] Let me tell you what's going to happen.

[1:12:08] This will come through.

[1:12:15] Me and help.

[1:12:18] Any comments?

[1:12:20] I can't even do that.

[1:12:22] Sorry.

[1:12:23] But, you know, coming at somebody like that, as compared to, is there any way that I can assist you work, you know, you have any needs I can address or, right, and I'm back here, and I'm being respectful.

[1:12:34] So this whole part, and trust me, we are sizing up people all the time, as soon as somebody approaches us, we know, they don't respect me, they respect me, they, you know, we know.

[1:12:52] What happens in your family when your mother uses your whole name and all you hear is that 38%?

[1:12:59] You say, well boy, I'm in trouble.

[1:13:02] Or your physician.

[1:13:05] What kind of help you with today?

[1:13:07] I'm at it here.

[1:13:09] You're going to be having your arms crossed like that.

[1:13:11] You know what that's telling me?

[1:13:12] You're close.

[1:13:13] This is so, so important.

[1:13:16] Then these are all the ways that we start looking at people.

[1:13:18] When I had this woman who was a geriatric, notice the S, nurse practitioner, she came up to me after it, and she said,

[1:13:25] Ma'am, I'm the one in the office that does the sexual histories on older adults.

[1:13:32] I'm like, cool?

[1:13:33] And she said, yes, I am so, this is so important.

[1:13:37] She said, but you know what?

[1:13:38] It doesn't go well.

[1:13:39] I'm not sure what's happening.

[1:13:41] She said, it just, it's just not working.

[1:13:44] And I have all these things going through my mind.

[1:13:46] And the first thing that came out of my mouth was,

[1:13:50] are you breathing when you ask your questions?

[1:13:54] And she stopped and she said, no, no,

[1:13:59] actually I stopped breathing.

[1:14:01] And I said, well, it was the last time you thought

[1:14:02] comfortable giving your sexual history

[1:14:04] to somebody who wasn't breathing.

[1:14:08] I mean, really think about that.

[1:14:10] You can tell when somebody is with you or they're not.

[1:14:14] you know that and so all of this I mean we covered a lot of ground today so what

[1:14:23] is the most powerful three-letter word in English language no what no love L UV no it's

[1:14:36] I think it's not so hard.

[1:14:38] The most powerful, I only have four minutes.

[1:14:40] Come on.

[1:14:42] You?

[1:14:42] No.

[1:14:44] Eight.

[1:14:44] Eight?

[1:14:45] Absolutely not.

[1:14:47] No.

[1:14:48] Good for you though.

[1:14:51] I'm going to send that nurse practitioner after you.

[1:14:56] Why?

[1:14:57] That's good.

[1:14:58] The most powerful.

[1:15:00] Work, English language is the reason why is because you are program from the time you are born to respond to questions. Can you say mommy? Can you say daddy? Can you do this? Can I think about your grandchildren of India, grandchildren or kids? You ask them a ton of questions and usually they're closed and they're yes, no questions. You just do that. And so we, every one of us in here has been program to answer. And as we go through our lives, when

[1:15:31] If somebody asks us a question, we feel like we need to answer.

[1:15:33] It's all responsibility to answer,

[1:15:35] because we're programmed, I'm an early age.

[1:15:38] So that's why if you want to know something

[1:15:40] you want to figure something out, please ask.

[1:15:45] If you say to somebody, is there anything that you need help with?

[1:15:50] And then you say, whoa, did I say that right?

[1:15:52] Did I ask you in the right way?

[1:15:53] Ask the question.

[1:15:55] They'll give you an answer.

[1:15:57] So get this dialogue going and ask.

[1:16:00] So, here's the challenge, that was a challenge.

[1:16:05] Whoops, okay.

[1:16:08] So, be conscious of the beliefs you have about aging,

[1:16:11] and the stereotype you have been taught.

[1:16:13] What is the story you make up about her?

[1:16:19] And what does that tell you?

[1:16:26] That's interesting, because she has a walker.

[1:16:28] She's been sober.

[1:16:29] How come you didn't see the elderly part?

[1:16:33] You saw the form.

[1:16:37] So, here's some of your juice coming out in terms of aging now.

[1:16:41] I watch out for our personal life.

[1:16:44] She looks great.

[1:16:45] How about this one?

[1:16:53] She knows what she's doing.

[1:16:56] Now, if I start off with something like this in the beginning,

[1:17:00] people can say she's seen I also have dementia,

[1:17:03] you know, whatever.

[1:17:04] You know, they're going by what she's wearing.

[1:17:06] And then, you know, they might be the occasion person,

[1:17:09] since what she really is a visual issue,

[1:17:12] a vision issue.

[1:17:14] She's like, yeah, yeah.

[1:17:17] But just think the postman's probably have a grand time, right?

[1:17:20] So, but the point is here that you can just go down a single track right away and say,

[1:17:27] she has dementia.

[1:17:29] You could do that.

[1:17:30] But think more broadly, that's exactly what you get.

[1:17:33] We don't know until we ask.

[1:17:36] We don't know until we work with people and get to know people.

[1:17:39] And so I think that's the key in terms of anything that we're doing in our age-friendly

[1:17:43] communities, our age-friendly universities, just working with people in general, and oftentimes

[1:17:50] I feel just, because anything that I shared with you today really holds true across any

[1:17:57] age.

[1:17:58] It's not just about ageing, it's about people in general.

[1:18:02] So, and here we have, take our messages.

[1:18:05] Discover who each older person is, grasp what the ageing process means to that person, which

[1:18:13] It means you have to get out of your own way about what ageing means to you.

[1:18:18] If you feel good about it, the person in front of you may not.

[1:18:21] And how are you going to get out of your own way to find out how they really feel?

[1:18:25] If you feel really negative about ageing, the person in front of you is feeling like, I'm

[1:18:29] settled.

[1:18:30] I live in this moment, I'm embracing the world, then how are you going to join where they

[1:18:35] are at that moment?

[1:18:36] And you may have to ask questions.

[1:18:38] Listen with your heart, be authentic, present, be in the moment.

[1:18:44] Your name is, if I'm with Donna, right now, and I'm thinking about Jean back here that

[1:18:52] I am not present with Donna, I'm not, I need to be focused on her talking with her, right?

[1:18:59] Not all of you.

[1:19:00] So being present and conscious, that's all we were talking about before, what you believe

[1:19:05] are, and know your own juice.

[1:19:07] So, here's the metaphor, we have a bear in a bear who we think has scripted about how to be a bear.

[1:19:13] Does anybody think this is a little odd?

[1:19:18] In our society, what happens is people who are older, this is generality, people who are older, are given a winkle suit,

[1:19:27] and they're giving a scripted about how to be decreed.

[1:19:29] What happens in our society?

[1:19:31] Your terrible drivers, you have terrible personalities, you know, you're sexless here.

[1:19:35] I mean, that's the script, that society's putting in your hand.

[1:19:39] So, again, across the ages,

[1:19:45] if you're working, you go to work, what's the suit, that everybody

[1:19:50] tries to put on you, what's the script that they try to put in your hand?

[1:19:53] You go home and you visit your children, your grandchildren, what's the suit they try to put

[1:19:58] on you, what's the script that they put in your hand?

[1:20:02] You're not the grandmother or the grandfather or the cook, you're the one that makes cookies.

[1:20:06] Here's the script. Make sure you get it right. It's just amazing how wherever we go,

[1:20:16] you need to be conscious of

[1:20:22] Is somebody trying to put a suit on you and putting a script in your hands or are you willingly accepting that suit and script?

[1:20:31] It's very interesting,

[1:20:35] so I always say, be wary of gerontologists who die there here,

[1:20:43] and

[1:20:43] I invariably, when I talk to people in geriatrics in gerontology, they come up to me and say,

[1:20:48] my husband makes me die in my hair, it's like whatever, you know, be congruent, be who you are.

[1:20:54] And because I'm a professor here, sure, homework, hug or talk to someone with gray hair,

[1:20:59] or hug or talk to someone who is die here.

[1:21:02] The Boston Globe says you need at least four hubs of data survive, eight to five.

[1:21:10] That was in the Boston Globe.

[1:21:12] You can hug yourself.

[1:21:12] You can hug your animals.

[1:21:14] I don't care.

[1:21:14] Just get lots of hugs and give hugs, because I think that will help us be much more age friendly.

[1:21:20] So thank you all for that and I am going to turn this over to Meru Choppi who

[1:21:26] doing a wrap-up. Did

[1:21:44] I stun you in the silence?

[1:22:02] You want my pointer?

[1:22:07] I'm going to let you keep that microphone.

[1:22:09] I'll stand to you. I'll explain.

[1:22:16] So good morning, everyone. I'm really happy to be here.

[1:22:19] I was asked to be here because I've been studying how we get new ideas out into the community

[1:22:24] and to grow. Although I have a little bit of overlap with some of Maryland's talk.

[1:22:29] So my name is Mary Luchioff, and I am an instructor at the University of New England in

[1:22:33] the Public Health Program, but I also teach aging policy at the musky school.

[1:22:39] And in fact, I had some of this past summer.

[1:22:41] I had some of you are newly-vented medical graduates who had done one that had been in a nursing

[1:22:47] home and that program, and the other had been at class now, and they did say that their

[1:22:52] experience had been transforming for them.

[1:22:54] that a whole new outlook on, you know, how it would feel to be in the system of long-term care.

[1:23:02] And although they did make friends and relationships where they also got a glimpse of the sort of structural problems there are in long-term care, and that is a whole another talk.

[1:23:12] So, I'm in a journey, I practice law and runs for a better part of 20 years, but in

[1:23:18] 80s and 90s.

[1:23:19] And then I ran into assisted living facility in the mid coast area for another 15 years.

[1:23:24] And then I worked at the Muskie School doing aging policy research.

[1:23:28] So, for most of my professional life, I have been around older people.

[1:23:32] I have been caring for them, managing some of their issues.

[1:23:35] And of course, now I am older myself, so I have a whole nother perspective on what it's

[1:23:40] to grow older in our society and it is problematic for all of the reasons that Marilyn has said.

[1:23:46] So I'm going to tell you that we actually do have a new way of talking about aging but perhaps

[1:23:52] more important why it really matters to our physical and mental health and how we can convince others

[1:23:57] to adopt these new way of talking about aging. So, so, very important. So, a lot of very smart social

[1:24:05] scientists down in DC, this is a group of the sociologists, they are in the colleges, they are

[1:24:10] experts, linguists, they are working on ways to reframe aging.

[1:24:17] They are trying to figure out what are the words that we should use,

[1:24:19] the metaphors that we should say, in order to create a more positive and

[1:24:23] really more realistic view of aging in our society.

[1:24:28] So I want to tell you a little bit about what they're up to,

[1:24:30] and then again more importantly, how we can get everybody on board with this

[1:24:33] because we're a little bit behind the curve here.

[1:24:36] We need to catch up.

[1:24:37] We haven't done enough around reframing aging in the past several decades.

[1:24:42] So, as Maryland has beautifully said, when we hear that term elderly, we automatically

[1:24:46] think frail, we think limited in our capacity, in our abilities, which is bad for everybody.

[1:24:53] If we hear older person, however, that, of course, is way more neutral.

[1:24:57] It casts a much wider net on our abilities, really.

[1:25:01] It is not limiting in any way, and that is so very important.

[1:25:05] So, I want to tell you a little bit about how wide that is.

[1:25:09] How do we even know that that's the case?

[1:25:11] How do we know about what our associations are

[1:25:13] about words that we use?

[1:25:17] So this smart group of social scientists done in DC

[1:25:19] comprise the frameworks institute.

[1:25:22] And they have been working on reframing aging

[1:25:25] for the past several decades.

[1:25:28] They know, or our learning,

[1:25:31] is the way that we frame an issue.

[1:25:34] The words we use, the words we don't use,

[1:25:36] and really even, you know, what we omit when we're talking about, a particular issue, really impacts not only the way we think about a particular issue, but also the way that we behave, and that can be very problematic in our society.

[1:25:52] So there's long-standing research on framing and science is pretty clear on this, but what frameworks has been trying to do is figure out what exactly words are that we should be using, how should we frame an issue,

[1:26:05] in order to get the kind of societal response that we want.

[1:26:09] Because, honestly, we can teach one by one,

[1:26:11] but really we need a larger swell of movement

[1:26:14] in order to make meaningful change in our society.

[1:26:18] So, framework is trying to figure out

[1:26:19] how we can more effectively nudge people along

[1:26:23] in order to have more constructive associations

[1:26:26] with aging, both conscious association

[1:26:28] and our subconscious associations.

[1:26:30] Ultimately, what they want to see

[1:26:32] is governments, private businesses, enacting better laws, behaving better, more responsibly,

[1:26:40] maybe authorizing more funding for social supports to support people as we age. That's the

[1:26:46] ultimate goal. So frameworks is working on lots of big cultural issues. They took on huge stuff,

[1:26:52] like climate change, education, the economy, child abuse, elder abuse. They've lots of big

[1:27:02] And this is a screenshot of their webpage, I don't expect you to read this, but I show it because I want you to go on their webpage and look around, they have a ton of resources, all free, all the reporting that they've done on reframing aging is available for the public.

[1:27:16] It's incredibly rich information, and it does help you kind of think through, you know, what really are the issues, what are some of the root causes of why we speak this way about aging.

[1:27:27] So, what frameworks is done for the past five years is kind of fascinating.

[1:27:31] They have gone out and interviewed tons of people.

[1:27:34] They interviewed members of the public, hundreds of them,

[1:27:36] they interviewed aging experts, researchers, service providers,

[1:27:42] about their perceptions of aging, and what they did was they mapped out

[1:27:47] the gaps between what the aging experts know and say about aging,

[1:27:53] and what our public perceptions are of aging.

[1:27:55] Well, it's no surprise that there's a huge gap between that.

[1:27:59] So frameworks is trying to bring those more into alignment, and they've been testing the use of certain words.

[1:28:06] frameworks has a ton of suggestions on what we should all be doing, but what I've done is sort of distill them down to just basically four things, so you can remember them,

[1:28:15] so you can talk to your friends and acquaintances about them.

[1:28:18] All right, the first one is about words, and these are important words, the seven percent of the words that we actually do have to change in our language.

[1:28:28] So frameworks suggest that we actually use the term old person or older people more often than not.

[1:28:34] Those are the, they cast the widest net, and they are totally neutral, as I said.

[1:28:39] It's like saying, you know, children or teens.

[1:28:42] We don't associate with any particular ability or disability when we hear the term old person.

[1:28:46] Now that doesn't mean that older adult isn't appropriate, it's very appropriate, but what

[1:28:51] frameworks has found out in the research is that older adults actually associate with

[1:28:56] somebody younger in their 50s. So, elderly, we know, is that the far end of the disability

[1:29:02] spectrum, older person is more in the middle, and is more descriptive of really older people

[1:29:09] in the US. So, that's number one. Yes.

[1:29:14] Well, senior, again, it has a more of a negative

[1:29:16] connotation in our society. It's perfectly acceptable. You know frameworks is really clear about this when when they've come to Maine to do training

[1:29:23] and they don't want to be scolding about use of terminology. They just want us to understand

[1:29:29] what people associate with the use of certain words. It's perfectly appropriate to say see here and you still hear it

[1:29:35] but just know that it is when you're talking to somebody, it is associated with less ability and less functionality.

[1:29:47] Now, older person is the most neutral term, and it actually describes the age that

[1:29:53] framework's found is associated with the term older person is somebody in their 60s and 70s.

[1:30:02] Well, I think that's a good problem to have because we don't want to make those. We don't want to cut off anybody.

[1:30:08] You know, that's exactly the point that they're trying to make. It's just, you know, let's just talk about older people.

[1:30:13] You know, we're all people and now we're a little bit older, perfectly acceptable.

[1:30:19] Yes, it seems relative, but it's the important thing is, what do we associate in our minds? And we don't associate older person with anybody who's limited in their functionality.

[1:30:29] That's the point that Frank Marks is trying to make.

[1:30:34] So number two, Frank Mark says, be inclusive.

[1:30:36] We need to stop other ring.

[1:30:38] Generally speaking, we all think that somebody who is old

[1:30:41] is somebody other than ourselves.

[1:30:44] And I often tell the story, when I was an administrator,

[1:30:48] we had a couple of move in.

[1:30:50] The husband was 101.

[1:30:52] The wife was 97.

[1:30:54] And they were mad as hornets that they had to move into our facility.

[1:30:57] But they really did.

[1:30:58] They had lovely spot, but after a few weeks, you know, the husband started to get a little

[1:31:03] assimilated, but he didn't ever go upstairs to where the activities were, he didn't want

[1:31:07] to go to the dining room, and when somebody asked him, well, why don't you want to go upstairs?

[1:31:10] He said, I don't want to be with all those old people, but he was clearly the oldest person in the

[1:31:15] facility, but you know, that's what we do.

[1:31:17] Anybody who's old is somebody not us, even when we ourselves are older.

[1:31:22] So we need to stop that, what frameworks is learned is that this is a matter of social justice.

[1:31:28] When we talk about older people and talk about it in an inclusive way, we associate that with a more egalitarian society.

[1:31:38] We are all included, we all need to help one another in this aging thing.

[1:31:42] We're all going to age unless we die prematurely, which is not a very good thing.

[1:31:52] All right, the third thing, so important, and Marilyn said it, we do need to stop stereotyping.

[1:31:57] You know, older people, the process of aging is of course as diverse as every other aspect of being human and being alive.

[1:32:06] We are not, in fact, all crabbing and bad drivers.

[1:32:09] We are skilled professionals.

[1:32:10] We are beautiful gardeners.

[1:32:12] We are great cooks.

[1:32:14] You know, this, when we see this woman similar to Marilyn's cartoons,

[1:32:18] we automatically think there's something going on here.

[1:32:20] She's crazy.

[1:32:21] What's up with that?

[1:32:22] But I say to my students, if this were a 30-year-old woman, holding some kind of a stick,

[1:32:28] you would all want to know the backstory.

[1:32:29] You'd ask a whole bunch more questions before saying, something's crazy.

[1:32:33] But we know in this society's ages society that we are our neurons trip in the direction

[1:32:38] of saying there's something wrong here, she's nuts, but that's not the whole story.

[1:32:44] So stereotypes, and it's not that they are untrue, they are just incomplete, right?

[1:32:50] story about being an older person. So we need to get away from that sort of neuron-tripping,

[1:32:58] um, automatic, um, thinking that we do about aging. You know, it's important to remember

[1:33:03] that since we are, since so many of us are living so much longer, older people now comprise really

[1:33:10] two generations. You know, we start in the sixties and then we have lots of people who are well

[1:33:15] to their 90s and into their hundreds.

[1:33:19] We can't paint 40 years of people, 40 ages of individuals

[1:33:25] with one big, broad brush.

[1:33:27] And that's only, you know, it's going to get worse

[1:33:29] because we're going to be living longer and longer.

[1:33:32] So we know that there's a huge diversity in the way

[1:33:35] that we age and how we age and how we experience ageing.

[1:33:38] So we need to talk about it in that reality.

[1:33:42] You know, some parts of aging are great, and some parts are horrible, and we need to understand that.

[1:33:47] Older people are, in fact, less lonely than middle-aged people.

[1:33:51] Some folks don't know that. Older people can be less concerned about what other people think.

[1:33:56] We are, they have more free time to help our communities.

[1:33:58] But at the same time, we, in fact, are experiencing disability at higher rates.

[1:34:03] We are the victims of abuse, which is terrible.

[1:34:05] We are depressed and greater numbers, so this good and this bad, and there's everything in between.

[1:34:10] And that's the way that we need to talk about aging.

[1:34:14] All right, the fourth one is about building momentum.

[1:34:17] So what the framework scientists realized

[1:34:19] is that when we talk to other people about aging,

[1:34:23] we get better reception, and we get more open mindedness

[1:34:26] when we talk about the capacity to build momentum

[1:34:30] that over the lifespan, over a long lifespan,

[1:34:33] we have accumulated experience and knowledge and ideas

[1:34:36] that we can and should freely share with our friends

[1:34:39] in our communities. So when we use that metaphor of building momentum, we get a lot more positive

[1:34:46] reception and realistic reception about aging. We need to all see aging as more of a resource

[1:34:53] for our communities. We all have something to contribute, even though it might be modest.

[1:34:58] And if we want a society that really expands resources on improving services, then we have to

[1:35:05] value of the contributions that older people can make to our communities is so very important.

[1:35:10] And that's not to say that there are older people who are in a precipitous state of decline, either physical or cognitive decline.

[1:35:19] And for those people, we need to recognize what they have already contributed.

[1:35:23] They have already built momentum.

[1:35:26] And now we need to value that and care for them in the most compassionate and understanding way.

[1:35:32] So just quickly to recap what framework is saying.

[1:35:34] Use the words older person and older people as much as possible.

[1:35:40] Be inclusive, talk about aging in the most general way, because if we're not old already, we're certainly going to get there and everybody needs to realize that.

[1:35:48] Do not stereotype, see the diversity and the reality in aging and talk about it that way.

[1:35:55] And then see life experience as a process of building momentum.

[1:35:58] So those are sort of the basic frameworks, ideas.

[1:36:02] So how are we going to get this message out to our friends

[1:36:05] and our neighbors and our communities?

[1:36:08] We actually know a ton about how new things grow in our society.

[1:36:12] We've been studying this for a very long time.

[1:36:15] It started in agriculture back in the mid-20th century,

[1:36:18] moved to the manufacturing.

[1:36:19] We've been studying how innovations grow in society for a while.

[1:36:23] It's late to health care.

[1:36:25] It's a little bit late to social science,

[1:36:26] but there's some very important lessons.

[1:36:28] And again, I broken them down, big lessons,

[1:36:30] but I broken them down into four parts for you.

[1:36:33] So the first one is people are receptive

[1:36:36] to a new idea or a new way of doing things

[1:36:38] when they see the benefit to themselves

[1:36:40] or to their communities or to their families.

[1:36:42] So we need to help other people see the benefit

[1:36:45] of not speaking about aging in an ageist stereotype way.

[1:36:51] So there have been scientists studying ageist messages

[1:36:54] for a long time, and the impact of age is messaging on the human body, physical and mental

[1:37:01] bodies.

[1:37:02] And what we have found is that when older people hear ages to messages, it results in lots of

[1:37:09] awful things happening.

[1:37:10] So first, it leads to poor handwriting, which maybe is not so horrible, but there are some

[1:37:15] other really awful things.

[1:37:17] Poor our performance on memory.

[1:37:19] A stronger cardiovascular or stress response when asked to solve verbal puzzles, lower willingness

[1:37:26] to take risks, lower scores on a perceived health measure, higher scores on a measure of

[1:37:33] loneliness, more frequently quest for help, more frequent hospitalizations, a more

[1:37:40] negative assessment of our own perceived health.

[1:37:43] So when we hear negative, ageist messages, these are some of the awful things that can happen

[1:37:49] to our physical and mental bodies.

[1:37:51] So we don't want this, and we don't want this

[1:37:53] for our family members and our friends.

[1:37:55] So when we talk about ageism and the harms

[1:37:59] that come from it, you need to say to your friends

[1:38:02] and neighbors, this is why it's bad for you,

[1:38:04] this is why it's bad for your community.

[1:38:10] All right, the second thing we need to do

[1:38:11] to get new ideas to spread is to use our own influence.

[1:38:14] So we know from studies that new things spread

[1:38:17] in a community from the highest levels of a social system

[1:38:20] down to the lower levels of a social system.

[1:38:23] So if you are influential in your own communities or if you know people of influence,

[1:38:28] those are the ones you need to strategically target and talk to them about the importance of speaking in a new way

[1:38:34] about aging. This is why it is so important that the physicians in our community understand all of this

[1:38:40] because they tend to be at the higher levels of our social system. We need to convince the policy makers in Augusta

[1:38:46] and in Washington, that this is important for the health of our older people.

[1:38:51] So those are the folks we need to get on board, but in your individual homes and communities,

[1:38:55] you have some influence. I want you to use that influence as best possible,

[1:38:59] and know that those people that you talk to will then go out and speak to others.

[1:39:03] That's how the new things flow. Does anybody know who this is?

[1:39:11] So this is Eleanor Olström and she actually won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009.

[1:39:21] So she is clearly an older woman, even 10 years ago, she would have been an older woman,

[1:39:25] gifted, brilliant, and she would say for sure that there are important economic benefits

[1:39:32] talking about aging and a more positive and more realistic way.

[1:39:38] All right, the third thing is we need to communicate these new ways of talking about aging to people who are in a diverse,

[1:39:45] who are different than we are in diverse situations.

[1:39:49] So what that means basically is that we need to talk to people who might be resistant to thinking and talking this way about aging.

[1:39:57] We definitely need to talk to younger people because they don't often understand fully

[1:40:01] what why this is so important, and we need to make sure that if they are resistant,

[1:40:07] that we kind of go back to step one and talk to them very plainly and candidly about the

[1:40:12] benefits of positive aging messaging, or more realistic aging messages.

[1:40:20] And I have a 3A in here

[1:40:22] because the other part of communication is what platform we are using to talk about aging.

[1:40:29] You know, this is the Twitter page from the Tri-State Learning Collaborative on Aging.

[1:40:34] If we're going to talk to Gen Xers and Millennials, we need to use the platforms that

[1:40:40] they use.

[1:40:41] Twitter is one, of course, this Facebook is lots of others, but it's up to us to keep

[1:40:45] up and figure out where they are getting their information.

[1:40:49] What platforms do they go to, what platforms do they trust, and use those platforms to

[1:40:54] our best advantage?

[1:40:55] Otherwise, we're never going to reach that audience, and it's absolutely critical that

[1:40:59] do reach that audience. If you have a good community newsletter like we do in my hometown

[1:41:04] of Bath, use the newsletter. Maybe there are some communities where this is the best

[1:41:09] form, sort of a live meeting. That's fine. My point is just, know your community, know, let's

[1:41:16] know the state of Maine, let's know the people we're talking to and use that information strategically,

[1:41:21] so we can get this information out as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible.

[1:41:28] Okay, so the last pillar is time and I just want to talk to you for a minute about the trajectory of change of a new idea in a community.

[1:41:39] So this is the diffusion S curve and of course the Y axis here on the vertical plane is the percentage of people who have adopted this new thing.

[1:41:51] And then the x-axis on bottom here is time.

[1:41:54] So what we're trying to do is get this new way of talking about aging out there in the

[1:41:58] community in the shortest period of time.

[1:42:00] So we want to compress that bottom curve.

[1:42:03] And the way that we can do that is to figure out how to get the S curve to go straight

[1:42:07] up.

[1:42:08] And we know from Malcolm Gladwell's work about the tipping point and the science around it that

[1:42:14] that point tends to be around 20 or 25%.

[1:42:19] So if we can get 20 or 25% of our families, our communities, whatever our unit of measure

[1:42:25] is, if we can get 20 to 25% of people on board with this new way of talking and thinking

[1:42:31] about aging, then that change is going to happen very quickly.

[1:42:35] The change will happen in a direct vertical line and the reason for that is that it starts

[1:42:40] to become a little bit of a liability when we don't use this new thing, this new way

[1:42:44] talking about aging, we're not there yet, but we'll know when we're there, right, Marilyn

[1:42:50] when somebody says elderly, and the rest of the room like bristles and starts to feel awkward

[1:42:57] about it, that's when the old way of doing something is a liability. So how are we going

[1:43:03] to reach the tipping point?

[1:43:09] So many of you probably would not be surprised to know that some

[1:43:12] people are going to be right out of gate with this new thing. Other people are going to

[1:43:15] way behind. Well, it's no surprise that we have categories, the social science

[1:43:21] around this puts us all in some buckets around whether we're going to be

[1:43:25] early adopters or lag or it's at the far end. Now, over here on your left side

[1:43:32] we have the innovator. So that's frameworks. That's a very small percentage of people

[1:43:36] out there who are actually coming up with a new ways of doing things. That's frameworks.

[1:43:40] But guess what? We are all early adopters. It's why you're here. It's why Marilyn and

[1:43:45] here, I'm Patricia back to here. We are all here because we are right on board with this and we

[1:43:50] want to get others on board. So we need you. We need the early adopters to help push this thing up the

[1:43:57] S curve. And if I overlay the S curve on this graph, you'll see how important it is that all of

[1:44:03] us early adopters go out and find more early adopters and then push the early majority along

[1:44:09] because we absolutely need to reach that tipping point as quickly as possible.

[1:44:15] So how do we know that there are early adopters?

[1:44:17] Well, you can tell, early adopters tend to be very enthusiastic and passionate about what they're doing.

[1:44:23] They want to learn more, they want to hear more.

[1:44:26] The early majority tends to be a little more cautious.

[1:44:28] You might have to fight a little harder to get them to pay attention to your message.

[1:44:32] Don't worry about those laggards at the far end.

[1:44:34] If you can bring them along fine but don't waste your energy on them because they will have to come along eventually.

[1:44:41] Really you want to focus on the people who think like you and also think differently but willing to come on board quickly.

[1:44:52] So my points are, go out into your community, talk a good game about this, talk to people about how important this is.

[1:45:00] And keep doing it because we absolutely have to reach that tipping point as quickly as possible.

[1:45:06] So thank you all for inviting me here. And I think we're ready to take a few questions. I know we don't have much time, but Marilyn and I are both here for questions.

[1:45:22] We definitely want to open it to questions, but as you're leaving, feel free to pick up the book, disrupting aging. It is there. It's available and it's free.

[1:45:31] And Pat is back there, and she's trying very hard to catch up with you with your, when you ask questions so that the people who are listening online can hear you.

[1:45:42] So any questions?

[1:45:46] Pat?

[1:45:50] You're me without it.

[1:45:52] Since you're down in the Hills Beach area, I wonder if you were familiar with Sarah Ballblisky.

[1:45:58] Yes, absolutely.

[1:46:00] She's one of my dearest friends.

[1:46:02] And when I saw that one photo of the woman with it,

[1:46:05] that's all I could think of.

[1:46:07] This woman who just passed away, as you probably know,

[1:46:10] was 97, we think.

[1:46:14] And she was working in the kitchens at the cafeteria.

[1:46:19] Yes, I worked with her there.

[1:46:20] She's just brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

[1:46:24] And a lesson to everybody.

[1:46:26] I wish if you hadn't known her,

[1:46:28] I wish you would find people that did because what

[1:46:30] life less than that would.

[1:46:32] I think the question there is, and again, we're into that socialization, but if you didn't

[1:46:38] know what age you were, what age would you be, but the question then is, why is age

[1:46:46] matter?

[1:46:47] I mean, I get kind of caught up in this loop because it's two numbers or three numbers.

[1:46:54] It doesn't, our society put the message on that, and Sarah definitely,

[1:47:00] each was totally brilliant.

[1:47:08] She was actually a force.

[1:47:11] Unbelievable.

[1:47:12] The most beautiful garden in Bitterford.

[1:47:15] I very stone in everything.

[1:47:17] She laid herself that this woman was incredible.

[1:47:20] So think beyond those two or three numbers, it doesn't really,

[1:47:23] It doesn't mean anything other than you might get Medicare or whatever, but again that's all social structures.

[1:47:31] Come on, challenge us, we want to be challenged.

[1:47:37] Um, do you know if frameworks looked at the perceptions among cultures that, you know,

[1:47:42] were they different among cultures?

[1:47:44] It's a great question.

[1:47:49] To my knowledge frameworks has not yet looked at international perceptions of aging,

[1:47:54] but I'm sure that's on their radar because as a globe we are aging.

[1:47:58] I would guess that on some of the other issues they have looked beyond the U.S. like climate change and that sort of thing.

[1:48:05] And I'll add to that that in other cultures, there were a group of us that were approached by universities in India

[1:48:13] that wanted us to come and share our knowledge and expertise about aging and I said no, because everyone that they chose had a Western perspective of aging

[1:48:27] And yet, the project, as they named, it was called the Da Vinci Project, and they pictured

[1:48:34] Eugen as a painter's palette, and that there would be all these different hues and colors

[1:48:40] that would make up who a person is.

[1:48:43] And they said, you are absolutely on the right track.

[1:48:45] You don't want to be talking to us because we're westernized.

[1:48:49] And Eugen is not valued in the Western societies.

[1:48:52] And we see those changes happening in China and other Asian countries where they're buying

[1:48:57] into those Western values, which are not very supportive at this point.

[1:49:02] We're really trying to make those changes.

[1:49:04] You know, it is fascinating to know that, you know, the American myth, the American narrative

[1:49:08] of independence and for entiersmen, all of that, is where some of this comes from.

[1:49:14] And that's sort of unique to American culture.

[1:49:16] It doesn't mean that there aren't other cultures that have a worse perception of aging than

[1:49:20] we do, but that's where ours comes from.

[1:49:22] And it's very deep in old, and it's most unfortunate.

[1:49:34] because I've heard and this could be maybe outdated, but within America, the cultures, like

[1:49:42] Hispanic, Asian cultures, in America are more accepting to it and they actually take their

[1:49:48] older family members into their homes and it's actually more of the white people that are

[1:49:54] in these housing units and stuff like that. I don't know if that's still true, but

[1:49:59] the throw away society in America, or hit me on the way to go.

[1:50:03] Yeah, it is true that there are certain subsets of individuals here that treat their

[1:50:09] older people in their own communities and in their own families a little bit differently.

[1:50:13] And I think what we need to do here is leverage some of that to the extent that it's helpful.

[1:50:18] I mean in the Hispanic culture there's a lot of burden on the women in the family, in the daughters

[1:50:23] of the older people.

[1:50:25] I'm not sure that's always that helpful.

[1:50:27] So there's some, there's some given take.

[1:50:30] I'm just curious, in talking about stereotypes of older people,

[1:50:35] would it be a stereotype to say that older people are more honest?

[1:50:41] Yep.

[1:50:44] Could you say where the questions coming from now?

[1:50:48] I'm not sure.

[1:50:49] I think, probably, I believe that people are more honest

[1:50:54] as they're older, and so I was wondering if it was a stereotype.

[1:50:57] So, that's part of your juice.

[1:51:02] That's a stereotype.

[1:51:06] Along those lines, I've always enjoyed working with older people.

[1:51:12] I think that's right.

[1:51:14] And one of the reasons is because I feel older people are

[1:51:18] like toddlers or four, five, six year olds,

[1:51:24] because they are so brutally honest.

[1:51:26] They don't really care, and it's a stereotype.

[1:51:28] But they tend not to care so much about perceptions, they just state the facts, they ask questions, they're curious, and I find as we grow older we tend to do that as well.

[1:51:45] If that was the case then we wouldn't have such a hierarchy of medicine right now.

[1:51:50] Because so many older people coming up to their physicians and that white coat syndrome happens and they just

[1:51:56] They they still are aware. We we are still aware of

[1:52:03] Hiroky and and who who in this world doesn't want to do right be right

[1:52:09] Just this part of your own essence right you want to fit in you want to feel like you belong

[1:52:13] I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying

[1:52:16] It's just that I think it's important to know who each individual is

[1:52:20] and what they're about rather than generalizing for a whole population.

[1:52:25] And if I could just add to that, and I do believe that that is our primary message today,

[1:52:29] is don't stick that label on until we really know that that's the truth about that person.

[1:52:34] And let's be sure that when we say that, we're just talking about that one person,

[1:52:39] and not painting with a bribe brush.

[1:52:42] Any other question?

[1:52:45] Come on, you didn't stump us at all.

[1:52:56] Okay, my parents who are 90, almost 92 and 88, and they are living in a retirement community,

[1:53:04] not assisted living, and my father would really love if younger people were around him.

[1:53:10] He has young family, I mean, my, I have grandchildren, it's his great grandchildren who he's getting to know.

[1:53:16] But the division of ages and communities seems to be to me, feels like it's not the most positive approach.

[1:53:26] And I just wondered if there are places that are looking at more

[1:53:32] intergenerational living for our older adults.

[1:53:37] Yes, there absolutely are.

[1:53:39] There's, I mean, not only are there intergenerational models of

[1:53:42] housing, bringing up all over the place, certainly in a broad,

[1:53:46] but definitely here in the US as well.

[1:53:49] So that's definitely happening.

[1:53:51] And there's a lot of variety among those different intergenerational

[1:53:54] model, some are in universities, some are just in towns, some there's shared housing projects,

[1:53:59] that the demand has a really robust shared housing model where an older person can stay

[1:54:04] living at home and then a younger person comes into share of the house. So there's lots happening

[1:54:09] in that area all really, really good stuff. And then there's lots of intergenerational programming

[1:54:15] that's happening between elementary schools and nursing homes and assisted living. So it's really

[1:54:20] very specific to each community, but my feeling is that we're not going to get a ton of

[1:54:26] traction on all that intergenerational programming or a lot of funding for it until we

[1:54:31] kind of change the paradigm around aging generally. We're just not going to get enough up,

[1:54:36] tick in it. So we need to work at both levels. We need to continue the programming and we need

[1:54:42] to really start farading out the ages, the ages.

[1:54:45] Well, that's definitely one of those paradigm shifts that we're working towards. Because what

[1:54:51] You said about 101-year-old, I don't want to be with those old people, right?

[1:54:55] People want to be part of our community.

[1:55:03] I can verify what she said for eight years, I lived in a 55-in-out, I'm out of there.

[1:55:11] It's not health, it's not normal, and it made me feel 20 years older than I was.

[1:55:18] And so I said, if I'm not using it, I'm losing it.

[1:55:21] So I sold and we bought a place and we do everything ourselves.

[1:55:24] Hey, we're 20 years younger, we're happy as an album.

[1:55:28] Nice juice, yeah.

[1:55:38] Thank you so much.

[1:55:40] This has been, I'm sorry.

[1:55:42] Good.

[1:55:43] Marilyn, I met with you somewhere around 10 or 15 years ago at the college.

[1:55:48] And like you said, I didn't remember what you said.

[1:55:53] However, I came here today to watch the enthusiasm you had 10 to 15 years ago.

[1:56:00] It was great then, and it was great today.

[1:56:03] Thank you.

[1:56:04] That's good.

[1:56:05] Thank you.

[1:56:06] Thank you.

[1:56:08] Patricia?

[1:56:11] Patricia?

[1:56:13] Go ahead.

[1:56:13] No, I'm just saying.

[1:56:14] Well, Patricia's coming up, another hand of applause for both our speakers today.

[1:56:24] It has been said, and when my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the walk that is higher than

[1:56:31] I.

[1:56:32] We've had a lot of walks on which to base the encouragement we've been given today to

[1:56:37] go out and do better and grow young.

[1:56:45] Thank you very much for coming today, by the way, I am Patricia O, I work with ARP Maine with

[1:56:50] family communities and I have to say I really love the York County group. They were

[1:56:56] sitting around a table at a regular meet-up and there was a story told about

[1:57:01] somebody who let some language slip and somebody who caught the language and the

[1:57:05] next thing you know we had this event so anybody who has a chance to get involved

[1:57:09] in your age from the initiative in your own community I strongly encourage it

[1:57:13] because it is one way that we are disrupting aging and reframing the way we're

[1:57:17] talking about aging and what we expect from people in their communities, what we expect from all

[1:57:22] of us.

[1:57:23] So thank you very much.

[1:57:24] Have a great rest of your day and don't forget to pick up your free book on your way

[1:57:28] out because I actually am too old to want to bring those back home with me.

[1:57:35] Thank you again and drive carefully.

Interupting Aging

Transcript