For many people living with Parkinson’s Disease, sexual functioning can change, but intimacy doesn’t have to. I was working with a 70-something husband and wife a few months ago. The wife was living Parkinson’s Disease and had extreme tremors in her arms and hands. Her…

As a clinical health psychologist specializing in chronic pain and illness, I have spent the past 12 years working with people who have chronic pain, and during that time I have learned a lot about the experience of pain and all of the many ways…

According to a study by the CDC, chronic pain impacts over 16,386,000 older adults age 65-84 and an additional 2,596,000 MORE adults over the age of 85 (Dahlhamer et al, 2018).  If you read my post about chronic pain in older adults, you also know…

  How common is pain among people 65 and older? For better or for worse, most of us associate chronic pain with getting older. We assume that as we age, our bodies will naturally break down and that pain is “just part of getting older”. …

In honor of world AIDS day on 12/1, I am devoting today’s episode to HIV and Aging. And, yes. HIV is an important topic when it comes to aging. An estimated 1.2 million people in the United States had HIV at the end of 2018.…

Answers to some of the most frequently asked questions I get about delirium What is delirium? Delirium is an acute medical problem often resulting in changes in cognitive function and mentation (e.g., the way the brain thinks, remembers, processes information, etc). It can create problems…

Do you know if the medications your older loved ones are taking are actually harming them? You might have a guess, but how do you actually know?! Thankfully there is a resource, called the Beers List, put out by the American Geriatrics Society, that lists potentially…

  One of the most complicated situations families that I work with are faced with has to do with older adults with dementia developing a delirium.   Is the dementia worsening? Or is it a delirium? It’s so hard to tell. In this week’s episode,…

Imagine you live in DC and your aging parent lives alone in Michigan and needs support and resources. You’ve been to visit your parent a few times to help get them set up with services, but you’re finding it more and more difficult to take…