Kindness turns out to be practical

[nancylebov]

Letting Alzheimer's patients have any harmless thing that makes them comfortable or happy causes them to be easier to deal with.

Unfortunately, this leaves me wanting to rant about how stupid and mean it is to have the usual high-dominance policies when it's plausible that kindness is a better tool for getting those policies changed.

Link thanks to Marginal Revolution.

Comments

[firecat]

It helps a lot. It's not always enough, unfortunately.

[nancylebov]

Agreed that kindness isn't a complete solution, though if the article is correct, it may be the best available method for dealing with Alzheimers patients.

[green_knight]

(No time to read the article right now, so apologies if this is already in there)

The thing that move me most was an article about an old people's home that installed a bus stop nearby. When the patients felt a need to go home, they'd go to the bus stop, wait, and after a while could be persuaded to come back in again. It illustrated the whole tragedy of Alzheimer's, and yet it did so much for people to make them feel safe - the bus stop indicated 'you can leave any time you like' which... was deceptive, but far kinder than saying 'you are not stuck here and you will die here.'

[nancylebov]

I strongly recommend reading the article-- the fake bus stops are a mere sketchy beginning of what gentle treatment looks like.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that the article-writer mostly doesn't know what sie's talking about. The baby-doll thing (for instance)has been standard practice for years. Nursing-home residents always have supplemental food available - I believe that it's a Joint Comission requirement. Beatitudes does sound like they have a good program - if they're really able to prevent sundowning, that's amazing - but I'm reluctant to come to any conclusions about it from an article that gets so much that I know wrong. (And this is a personal thing, but they say that "several nursing homes in Illinois" are using Beatitudes' protocol: which ones, damnit? Then I could get some trustworthy information!)

Alzheimer's care is legitimately really hard, and some of the tradeoffs just suck no matter how you slice it, but there is actually a great deal of care and effort going into making it better right now.

If I remember correctly that you are in NYC, I can give you some pointers (ten years out of date, but I can check with friends who are still local for some of them) about which nursing homes are doing a good job with this stuff.

-Nameseeker

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks-- I realize I tend to be somewhat overly trusting about things that sound cool.

With a little luck, more information one way or the other will turn up.

Does the bit about people with Alzheimer's remembering emotions longer than specific details sound plausible to you?

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yes it does - but many of the things they are reacting negatively to are purely internal, or are a product of the persecutory delusions which are a common symptom of the disease.

-Nameseeker