The stats that jump out at you are that Americans spend roughly $7300 annually on medicine while Canadians spend $2700 per head and Britons come in at $2000. Bortz, a physician for over 50 years (and a prime example of someone engaging as they age!), argues that the financial interests of drug and biotech companies have “distorted the healthcare system” and put us in this predicament.

In Next Medicine, Bortz calls for a new medical system based upon rigorous science and not corporate interests. He argues that the corporate interests that are distorting our healthcare system have created an medical environment in which treatment is financially rewarded instead of prevention. Dollars go into fixing problems instead of trying to prevent them (causing us to spend such large and ineffectual sums of money on healthcare).

At Engage As You Age we regularly see firsthand the benefits of proactive approaches to preventing health issues and also sadly see the significant costs associated with reactive treatments. If you know someone that is lonely, isolated and/or depressed it is imperative that you proactively find ways to socially connect and engage them. There are numerous studies that point towards the health benefits associated with being socially engaged.

Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about the benefits of social engagement. Come to Avenidas this Tuesday if you’d like to hear Dr. Bortz discuss his most recent book highlighting the benefits of prevention (compared to simply reacting and treating).

Dr. Bortz’s talk will take place at 2 pm at 450 Bryant Street in Palo Alto, CA.

Most importantly: do you consider yourself an elder?

And do you have some wisdom to share?

Then think about entering the 2011 Elders Prose and Poetry Contest. Winning submissions will be included in “Gems of Wisdom: 365 Days of Poetry and Prose by Elders.” The book is scheduled to be published in May 2011.

Any resident of California who considers himself or herself an elder (meaning no age requirement) can enter the contest. AgeSong and Barnes and Noble — organizers of the contest — suggest that elders write about “real emotions and feelings and keep a special person or event in mind as you write. For example, questions to ponder: What is your relationship with the world? What do you want to teach someone?”

We work with seniors across the Bay Area, and all of them have a story to share. As we encourage our wise and diverse seniors to submit a poem or essay, we hope you’ll consider asking your mom, dad or spouse to also enter the writing contest.

This is what happened to Barry Peterson, a CBS news correspondent. He came home one day and his wife Jan, also a television journalist, didn’t recognize him. She mixed up the words in her sentences. Eventually, she had trouble even forming a sentence.

Peterson just released a book about his experience titled Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s. The memoir tells the story of Jan Peterson, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s five years ago, and her husband’s struggle to cope with the disease.

“In any other disease, you do say goodbye, but with Alzheimer’s you say goodbye over and over and over,” he told CNN. “I had a friend who said, ‘It’s like going to the same funeral over and over again.’”

Barry and Jan were married on Valentine’s Day 1985 in San Francisco. Thereafter, the journalists traveled the world together as they reported on wars in Sarajevo and Rwanda, and saw thousands die of a cholera outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Throughout, Barry coped.

“But the week when I had to fly from Tokyo to Seattle by myself and arrange for Jan to move into an assisted living facility, a place I was told she should probably never leave,” he writes in his book, “that was when I learned how a man can fall to the floor because he is weeping so hard.”

Jan is lucky that at the very least, Barry and his new partner serve as co-caregivers for Jan. She may not recognize Barry, but he still ensures she has companionship and proper care. Many seniors are not so lucky, as their partners may have died or their children live out of town.

Engage As You Age understands the importance of social interaction and consequently works with a range of individuals diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer’s.  Our Activity Specialists are selected according to each client’s needs to ensure our employees are properly matched, trained and and prepared. Because even people like Jan still need social interaction and human connection.

Additionally, we know how taxing and exhausting being a primary caregiver to a person with Alzheimer’s can be. Providing homecare for a senior is difficult to do on your own. Our Activity Specialists can provide much-needed respite from such work. This is especially important because the research shows that the stress of serving as a caregiver can shorten that person’s life by four to eight years.

The Roadmap to 100, Bortz and Stickrod’s new book, utilizes new science and a thirty-year longitudinal study of centenarians and finds that:

• genetics play a smaller role in aging than previously thought
• senility, dementia, and other diseases of the elderly, are largely preventable (and not an inevitable consequence of aging)
• engagment, through sexual relationships, SOCIAL INTERACTION, and professional activity, is a KEY FACTOR in long, healthy lives
• physical fitness can recover at least 30 years of aging

At Engage As You Age we’re not at all surprised by their finding that social interaction for seniors is a key factor in living a longer and healthier life. Go to our website if you’d like to learn more about our social visits for seniors and also for more studies that highlight the benefits of social engagement for elders.

Bortz, the former co-chairman of the American Medical Association’s Task Force on Aging has also presided over the American Geriatric Society and published the book Dare to Be 100. In fact, Bortz is a great example of a senior engaging as they age. He recently ran his 40th marathon at the age of 80! His co-writer, Stickrod, is the founding executive publisher of Wired magazine.

The Roadmap to 100 recommends a steady diet of exercise and social engagement to make it to 100. They stress that while exercise can help you live longer, it is social engagement that allows you to live well. They find that meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose are common factors amongst centenarians.

Go to the LA Times for a more detailed book review or go to Amazon.com to buy a copy.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you can go to Engage As You Age’s website to connect your mother, father, aunt, uncle or partner to someone that shares their passions.

The 40 seniors interviewed in the book were Canadians ranging in age from 75 to 100. They were living in Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Kingston and Halifax. We’re pretty positive at Engage As You Age that her findings in Canada would be found south of the border in the United States and certainly throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Green’s main message in the book is that the key to happiness for elders lies not in the amount of money they have in their bank accounts but in the friendships that they cultivate and nurture. She adds that getting old shouldn’t be avoided but rather it should be embraced. Friendships are key for seniors that are widows, living alone or even those living with a partner.

Age is seen by Green to be not just a loss of youth but a new stage; a new opportunity.

A great quote by Green in an interview in The Globe and Mail says that “You can sit in a very nice, well-financed retirement home and be completely miserable because you don’t take the time to develop friendships and interests and engagements beyond yourself.”

At Engage As You Age we wholeheartedly agree with Green and believe that our social programs for homebound seniors that may reside at assisted living facilities or their own homes (wanting to age in place) help seniors connect with new friends that share their interests. Go to www.engageasyouage.com to learn more about Engage As You Age and feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Lyndsay Green’s book or any other books that address ways to age positively or programs for retirees.

In one of them, Roth says that the “standard story is that age brings about wisdom” and he doesn’t buy into that narrative. I do believe that Roth’s writing highlights how he’ s gained perspective on relationships between people and people and their own bodies. His series of books in the 1990s and first part of the 2000s were (for my money) the highlights of his career thus far. American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain, and Sabbath’s Theater are all amazing.

To learn more about Everyman click here for Amazon’s reviews on the book.

Below are three video clips of Roth discussing aging, Everyman and his career.

Here’s an interesting video of Roth looking back on the first 3 1/2 decades of his career:

A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Block spent a semester researching Alzheimer’s in an undergraduate memory lab and had first-hand experience with Alzheimer’s disease as his mother’s dise of the family had been suffering from it for generations.

Below is an excellent book trailer that will give you a good sense of the book:

The Story of Forgetting was published by Random House in 2008. Here’s a link to the author’s website.

The central theme of the book is that America has long been fixated on its youth and that our culture brands aging as a bad thing to be avoided. The photographs, interviews and stories in the book present an alternative where aging men and women continue to grow while growing older. This growth is done by running, swimming, surfing and even trying to rope a steer. Aging is cast as an opportunity to reinvent and stretch oneself throughout the book.

The book also features a forward by gold-medal winner Peggy Fleming who got first place in figure skating at the 1968 Winter Olympics.

While we don’t focus on the physical at Engage As You Age, we do believe that it is every bit as important as continuing to be cognitively stimulated.Whether you want to learn how to surf or learn a new language, we’re all for it. Life is what you make out of it. The key is to continue being engaged with things that you love (whether it is an old hobby or learning something new).

To learn more about the book you can go to the Chronicle Books website. Click here to learn more about Engage As You Age.

Has anyone read Paula Span’s book When The Time Comes? In it, Span examines the way in which 12 families navigate their respective eldercare decisions. This is a great read for families currently dealing with aging issues but also a wonderful resource for those who are  looking to proactively tackle issues of aging. Span, a contributing reporter at The Washington Post, tells the stories of these 12 families contemplating everything from assisted living to hospice to home health aids. The book also has a resource list and data on aging but most importantly it presents a wide-range of well-written stories that should resonate with readers going through this process.

Span will be in the SF Bay Area in the beginning of July. Go to her website for details on her speaking engagements in Danville, Mountain View and San Francisco.