Change Your Brain Every Day - What is the Most Important Tool in Caring for the Elderly?

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

In the fourth and final episode in a series on caregiving, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen talk about the difficulties in caring for your parents or other loved ones as they approach the other end of their lives. Learn the biggest common mistake people make, and what you can do to ensure you make the best choices for you and all your loved ones.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back to Caregiver Week.

And we've talked about caring for yourself, getting those four circles connected. But what about toward the other end of life and both you and i have older parents mine a bit older than yours but um you've been very worried about your mom well i'm in a sandwich generation deep end you've been in the deep end of the pool yeah when she had a head injury when she had a brain bleed death in the family when recently this was fun she just lost a day yeah so she ended up in the hospital we drove in two hours of traffic we thought she may be having a stroke and it ended up being a uti which by the way it's for a lot of you with um you know parents who are over the age of 60, if they present with memory loss and confusion, get them checked for a UTI first thing. But she also was under extreme stress, which can trigger

things like memory loss, even momentarily, like for a day or a half a day or a couple hours. It can trigger weird behavior like that. So that combined with some sort of virus can be problematic and so taking care of yourself taking care of your marriage because we do that you know we get to share we are good partners and i love what during grief week sandra said we invite each other into she said grief but we invite each other into our stress and we help we help each other into our caregiving our caregiving and our like i'm stressed he's my he's my person and when you are I want to be your person because we strengthen each other and if you don't have someone that's why building a positive network at church or in your community is just so important

and it could be why social isolation is one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease because with it you have no one to share these hard times with. So get the right medical help. Make sure your mind is clean of automatic negative thoughts. Try to be connected as much as possible and see the purpose in it I know for the last five years or so I've been very close to taking care of my dad who had a heart arrhythmia who had heart failure who has chronic back pain and you can go oh well I don't have time for that but in my head I have his turns 90 in May.

There's nothing more important. I have no idea how much time I have with him left. I mean, every day is a gift. So what is it I can do today to make this, his life better? For sure. Because that is purposeful to me. It's also why I'm really generally very nice to my own children because I know at some point they're going to be

taking care of me but yeah and if you are in the sandwich generation which I am and a lot of people my age are you're taking care of children sometimes you're taking care of children with disabilities and you're taking care of children sometimes you're taking care of children with disabilities and you're taking care of parents that are now beginning to have disabilities right so that's when it's really critical to take care of yourself and get some help because it's you can get burnt out really fast I've learned that quickly well and here at Amen clinics we're here for you whether you have a child with ADD or learning problems, autism, behavior problems, or you're struggling in your marriage or your moods, or you have someone, you know,

at the other end of life that's really struggling with their mind or their memories. You know, that's what I love about our work. We see little kids and old people and everybody in between, and we can provide that support for caregivers because it's like seven times out of ten. It's often a caregiver who's calling the call center saying, I need help. And so often there are resources that you don't even know about, like when my sister was going through a really hard time. One thing we learned is that there are people

who volunteer their time within the system. So within the system, there are people, we had people volunteering and giving her rides, volunteering and helping her go to the grocery store, crazy stuff, and they do this as their act of service. So actually look into what services are available for you, because most people aren't even aware how many there are. the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.