by Judy Starkweather
When my Mom moved to Atlanta, I needed to find a new doctor for her. I received a recommendation from someone at the Assisted Living Facility where she would be residing and made an appointment. After each visit, however, I had to make additional appointments with specialists, which meant carting my 91 year old Mom from one to another. It was tough since I was working full time. My mother wasn’t very helpful. She was always saying “Why are you taking me to another doctor? I’m sick of doctors!”
I learned that the Assisted Living Facility had a doctor who did “house calls” at the facility every Thursday. It sounded convenient, but the doctor always arrived at different times, so I seldom got a chance to connect with him and he eventually stopped coming to the facility all together.
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By Judy Starkweather
When my Mom moved to Atlanta, I needed to find a new doctor for her. I received a recommendation from someone at the Assisted Living Facility where she would be residing and made an appointment. After each visit, however, I had to make additional appointments with specialists, which meant carting my 91 year old Mom from one to another. It was tough since I was working full time. My mother wasn’t very helpful. She was always saying “Why are you taking me to another doctor? I’m sick of doctors!”
I learned that the Assisted Living Facility had a doctor who did “house calls” at the facility every Thursday. It sounded convenient, but the doctor always arrived at different times, so I seldom got a chance to connect with him and he eventually stopped coming to the facility all together.
I finally discovered that there were doctors called “geriatricians,” who deal exclusively with the elderly. When Mom had another fall, my sister and I went to work to find one. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of them out there and the one that was recommended to us wasn’t taking new patients. Could it possibly be this hard to find the right doctor?
I was getting desperate so I asked my personal physician and she recommended a very good one in the same office, who wasn’t a geriatrician, but who worked with many older people. After almost four years, we finally had our doctor!
This one truly understands the problems specific to the aging, and it’s made managing my Mom’s health care so much easier. She’s even trying to reduce the number of medications she takes, which is something my sister and I had been trying to do for years. She is also associated with the hospital nearest the Assisted Living Facility and will be able to guide her treatment the next time the inevitable occurs and she lands in the hospital. This is another important thing to consider.
The American Geriatrics Society has a Web site (http://www.americangeriatrics.org/) with a great deal of information about caring for your aging parents. If you go there, you’ll see that they are also concerned about the shortage of geriatricians in the country. Hopefully, as more of the population ages this specialty will become a more popular practice among doctors.
