Background Although there has been movement in cardiology to advance patient‐centered approaches to postacute myocardial infarction (AMI) care, work remains to be done in aligning patient preferences with clinical care. Our objective was to characterize patients’ experience of AMI and treatment to develop a new conceptual framework of patient‐centered recovery in cardiology. Methods and Results We conducted in‐depth interviews with people who previously experienced an AMI (2016–2019). The interview focused on participants’ experiences of their recovery, which were audio‐recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using a phenomenological framework. The overarching theme described by the 42 participants was feeling like a “different person” after the AMI. This shift manifested itself in both losses and gains, each of which posed new challenges to everyday life. The experience appeared to be an active process requiring people to take responsibility for their health. In terms of loss, participants describe how the AMI threatened their sense of safety and security and led to social isolation, fragility, uncertainty about the future, and difficulty expressing emotions accompanied this new fear. A conceptual framework describing the relationship between AMI, identity change, and functioning was developed. Conclusions Participants experienced the AMI as an unexpected disruption in their lives that had far‐reaching effects on their daily functioning, and were resolved in numerous ways. The conceptual framework may assist in providing a theoretical basis for future interventions in cardiology that not only engage and retain patients in care but also improve long‐term adherence to secondary prevention and other aspects of self‐care.
Using a political ecology framework to explore the gendered nature of extended family support networks for the elderly, this article reveals the ways that older women and men negotiate their social and material worlds in the context of extreme ecological and economic conditions. The historical processes that shape the social and material worlds in which these elders move include development induced resettlement, postcolonial politics and economics, and catastrophic chronic illness and mortality of children. Drawing from ethnographic research from 1994 through 2008, the article explores how people living in economically and ecologically dire circumstances manage their social and material worlds to the best of their ability.
My Mother's Hip: Lessons from the World of Eldercare (Temple University Press, 2004) is based on both my mother's experiences in navigating the healthcare system after suffering a double hip fracture and mine as her principal caregiver. What happens when an anthropologist who studies global aging inadvertently falls into the role of caregiver? Much like a physician who finds himself in an exotic world when becoming a patient, the social scientist–caregiver immediately begins to deconstruct the systemic flaws from a professional perspective. My Mother's Hip opened the Pandora's box of how we care for an aging society in the context of a fragmented medical system. We who write such books see a glaring need to inform the public about critical medical issues that inevitably crop up in the course of eldercare. Parallel to the medical story is the story of how an author produces a trade book about a problematical topic and promotes it without alienating the popular audience.
Representations of aging in Japanese art not only influence how older adults construct their identity in late life, but the ethical implications of this identification. This article concentrates on one representation of aging in Japanese art, the crone of Obasuteyama, as she has appeared in various forms throughout centuries of Japanese folklore, literature, theater, and film. This article argues that although the Obasuteyama story addresses the moral questions surrounding the fear of abandonment in old age, its multiple artistic interpretations also provide older adults with different, and sometimes contradictory cultural models to understand and cope with this fear. Ethnographic observations and interview material concerning aging and abandonment in the lives of present-day Japanese adults are used to show how seemingly different attitudes toward aging can be linked to a shared narrative of abandonment.
The right to self determination later in life is challenged when safety in a person's marginal existence is involved. In this narrative, the desire of an older woman to be independent is denied when her niece intercedes. Safety and practicality take precedence over autonomy. The life altering decision is perceived as a humane intervention by all except the person who is affected the most.
Exaggerated fears about losses as we age, especially as exemplified by inimical cultural stereotypes about transient short-term memory losses, may effectively prevent older individuals from enjoying the changes in their memory patterns. In later life, a lifetime of memories may spontaneously begin returning to us as we age. New cognitive science research seems to confirm insights from literature and depth psychology that older individuals are uniquely qualified to be explorers, as the poet T.S. Eliot has said they should be. Unlike the brains in younger years, older brains have "broad attention spans" that look beyond narrow boundaries as they search and explore the world about them. This essay includes World Wide Web URLs to 22 minutes of video documenting one 62-year-old woman's exploration of long-term memories in a life-review memoir. She wrote the memoir in a lifelong learning class, as a way of harvesting a part her long-term memory about a childhood trauma, and as a way of helping assuage the trauma by catharsis. Finally, I discuss recent research that indicates the strength that older people have to make good use of distractors. KEYWORDS: memorieslossliteraturestorycognitivelife-reviewvideo
Bump, bump shook the old door from 1834. Peering inward through the glass a weathered face of an old man seemed to expect to enter quickly. The hour was early, and being unfamiliar with the situati...
In the tradition of Lewis Thomas, MD and Robert N. Butler, MD, Gene Cohen, MD, PhD was a first-rate medical scientist whose legacy extends beyond his research and clinical practice. Dr. Cohen spurred extraordinary work with older people in the arts and humanities. And thanks to his zest for life and enthusiasm for others, Gene Cohen became a spokesperson for tapping the talents and wisdom of age.
A niece tells the story of serving as a co-executrix in settling her aunt's modest estate. Lessons learned include recognizing that when named persons in a will die, it is wise to have a list of their children; that a will from one state may be seen as foreign in an adjacent state; that ethical issues have to be considered in the settlement process; that updated contact information for any sources of money (no matter how small) is mandatory; and that one must consider contingencies that could impact the distribution of assets to heirs.
The objective of this study was to present findings from a literature review on the documented health benefits of arts programs for older adults. A systematic literature review was conducted to examine research publications on participatory arts programs for older adults and their reported impact on health outcomes. A total of 2,205 articles were found. Of these, 11 were eligible for inclusion. The review describes the effects of participation in art programs on a variety of health outcomes. The small number of empirical studies documenting the health impact and limitations in their design prohibit broad generalizations, however, findings suggest there are physical and mental health benefits for older adults from arts participation.
Retirement migrants in Spain claim a particular vision of time as finally “theirs.” It is a time for living in the present and contrasts with their previous time-bound working lives. This liminal temporality, which seems to diminish the significance of aging, is disrupted, however, by the high visibility of aging and death in such a community. Using an ethnographic approach, the article explores the societal and individual negotiation of retired migrants' arrivals and departures from the social scene as pertinent moments to interrogate these matters. These reveal that migrants' present-focused temporality is yet wholly informed by subtle awareness of future-time as “not there.”
Dear Readers: We recently learned that Taylor & Francis will no longer publish JAHA. This has been a difficult economic climate in which to launch a new journal. We were fortunate to have had a loy...
This essay uses the divergent experiences of the author, a middle-aged woman, at her home in Atlantic Canada and while visiting Florida to discuss how a woman learns to be old through interaction with others. It describes how her experiences in retirement-community laden south Florida, where she was 25 years younger than everyone else, made the better treatment that younger people receive obvious to her in a new way. At the same time she learned that the really old people are ignored in ways that are hard to overlook. KEYWORDS: ageismgenderexperiencing aging Notes 1. See CitationLaz (1998) for a discussion of societal beliefs that one can control how one experiences aging simply by living a healthy lifestyle. 2. Thanks to Anne M. Wyatt-Brown for making this point explicit. 3. The tendency not to notice the preferential treatment one receives by being a member of a dominant social category is not limited to age. For example, it is difficult for men to notice the privileges society bestows on them by virtue of their gender or for White people to be aware of how they benefit from being members of a privileged racial group (CitationJohnson, 1991, p. 151).
This article describes the author's experience when, as director of the New York-based Elders Share the Arts organization, she was designated as the research project director for Gene D. Cohen's landmark creativity in aging study. Her personal reflections describe how she began her work with Dr. Cohen as an arts administrator unexpectedly immersed in the world of outcomes research and later, as an important part of a project that demonstrated the possibilities and benefits of creativity and the arts in later life.
The Gray Panthers, formed in 1970, are an intergenerational social movement focused on peace, health care, housing, income adequacy, and social justice. Despite the loss of founder Maggie Kuhn in 1995, and a diminished membership since its peak in the 1980s, the Gray Panthers continue today. Key elements in this organizational success are their distinctive ideology and tactics. Here their concept of "the person" and their "outrageous" activist techniques are analyzed using published and archival Gray Panther materials and drawing on the author's involvement as active member during 1977–1978, 1980–1987, and 2004–2010, and his perspective as an anthropologist and historian.
