Working in conjunction with our Naturopath, Dr. Adams, we are really improving the health of our residents. And it's catching on! Our latest activity for the residents includes preparing healthy and delicious meals.
Here you can see one of them peeling oranges. Another resident's family brings in fruits and vegetables for us fresh out of their garden. We love the camaraderie all this healthy living is producing. Not to mention the health benefits!
Hospice is such a wonderful service. The men and women who come to our homes from various Hospice services around the Valley make a huge difference. Many families fear Hospice because they think it means their loved one is at the end.
It may mean that. However, we have had many residents become well enough not to need their Hospice services any longer. Hospice is like an extra caregiver. They make sure our residents receive extra attention in our homes. We really appreciate the help.
If you would like to know which Hospice's we really enjoy working with, feel free to reach out to us. You can find us on Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website,email us, or call 623-295-9890.
We'd love for you to stop by and meet all our wonderful residents. Just reach out to us through Facebook @aparadiseforparentsassistedliving, our website, Cam@aparadiseforparents.com or call 623-295-9890.
We're always looking for more ways to improve the health of our residents. You can see some blog posts (here, here, and here for example) describing some great exercises for seniors. When one of our resident's families brought the Passport to Wellness program, we were very excited.
Now our residents can exercise while they feel like they are climbing a mountain in Hawaii, walking up the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or seeing all kinds of cool stuff all over the world. If you would like to see what we are doing to improve the health of our residents, please reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email us, or call 623-295-9890.
The residents in our assisted living homes take a lot of medications. It’s pretty typical for older people who have a variety of chronic conditions. We always think of these medications as substances that are supposed to help us. But the drug-induced nutrient depletion that can result may cause more problems than the medications solve.
Medications are really important… For the condition they target.
On the other hand they may not be so good for rest of your body. Or other conditions you might have. They may even cause a condition you did not have before.
You’ve probably seen a few drug commercials. Particularly if you watch any programs popular with older generations. The FDA requires many of these drug companies to disclose the potential side effects from the drug. Some of those side effects can be quite scary. Here’s a little parody of the commercials:
A big reason why many of these drugs cause these side effects is because they deplete vital nutrients in your body. The lack of nutrients lead to other problems. Pretty soon you are back in the Doctor’s office. The Doctor gives you more drugs to fix the drug-induced nutrient depletion caused by the first drugs.
How Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Happens
There are several ways that Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion happens:
Certain drugs can suppress your appetite. Obviously if you don’t eat regularly, you are not receiving the kinds of nutrients your body needs
Other drugs can increase your craving for nutrient-depleted foods, such as refined and processed carbohydrates. Processed foods and sugars will satisfy your cravings but won’t do a whole lot to bring nutrients into your body
Internally certain medications can bind to the minerals in your gut before those minerals are absorbed into the bloodstream
Some drugs can lower the acidity in your digestive system, which means your stomach acid becomes much less effective at breaking down your food. This problem is particularly big in the elderly, because we lose stomach acid naturally as we age
Particular classes of drugs block nutrient levels in your cells. They can block certain enzymes or chemical receptors that aid in nutrient absorption.
Drugs such as diuretics help flush fluids out of the body to take unnecessary waste. Along with all those fluids can go a whole lot of nutrients as well
Common Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Problems
We see a lot of common drugs across many of our assisted living residents. Many of these drugs cause the drug-induced nutrient depletion that can lead to a host of other problems. Here are some of the most common, especially in the elderly:
Acid Blockers
These are mostly antacids, H2 blockers and Proton Pump Inhibitors. The way antacids work is to change the pH of the stomach to make it less acidic. This may help your heartburn or digestion short term. It doesn’t help the breakdown of your food with stomach acid. No food breakdown, no nutrient absorption.
H2 blockers and Proton Pump Inhibitors block histamines in your body which in turn blocks acid secretion. This is a particular problem in the absorption of Vitamin B12, especially in the elderly. It can also hurt the absorption of zinc, iron and folic acid.
Antibiotics
We see a ton of prescriptions in our assisted living homes. And we are not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2015 there were 269 MILLION antibiotic prescriptions in the United States alone. Antibiotics can deplete all your B vitamins, along with Vitamin K, calcium, potassium, folic acid and magnesium. Some can cause drug-induced nutrient depletion of less well-known vitamins such as biotin and inositol.
Here is some more information about antibiotics and nutrient depletion:
Blood Pressure Medicine
The way blood pressure medicine works is by flushing fluid out of your body. Lower fluid, lower blood pressure. Along with the fluids go vitamins and nutrients. Many doctors will have you take potassium with the blood pressure medications to avoid that drug-induced nutrient depletion. Although these medications can also lower your levels of magnesium, sodium, pyridoxine, thiamine, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and zinc.
Cholesterol-Lowering Medications
Drugs that target cholesterol levels are generally called statins. Statins are some of the largest selling drugs on the planet. While it is a good idea to keep your cholesterol levels in check, there are definitely some side effects to statins. You can see another blog postwe wrote to find out about some of these side effects. Or read about the most widely-sold drug on the planet – the statin drug Lipitor.
The biggest drug-induced nutrient depletion that occurs with statin drugs is Coenzyme Q10. Or more commonly known as CoQ10. A lack of CoQ10 can lead to:
Irritabiility
Moodiness
Muscle issues (pain or failure)
Impotence
Depression
Heart failure
Yup. That last one could be fatal. It’s also what you are trying to avoidwhen you take statin drugs in the first place! The other thing to think about is that the body needs some level of cholesterol to function. Artificially lowering your cholesterol through drug-induced nutrient depletion may cause more problems than it solves.
Bottom line: Talk to your Doctor, but if you’re on a statin drug, it would probably be a good idea to take a CoQ10 supplement as well.
Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)
After menopause, many women look to Hormone Replacement Therapy to help them regain the hormones they have lost with age. HRT can do some good things like slowing bone loss and therefore reduce the risk of falls and bone fractures.
Of course, there are some problems with HRT as well. The same drugs that help restore hormones can also deplete vitamins B6 and B12, folic acid and magnesium. It would probably be a good idea to work with your Doctor to take some supplemental vitamins if you are using HRT.
There are lots of problems due to drug-induced nutrient depletion when you have a lot of medications. It’s tough to keep track of them all. We found this handy table from Pharmavite LLC that can help you look up some of the potential deficiencies.
Or you can use this..
Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Calculator
Dr. Jeffrey Gladd is an integrative medicine doctor in Indiana who was becoming frustrated about drug interactions as well. So he decided to do something about it.
In 2009 he created the website Mytavin to figure out which nutrients you are losing when you take certain drugs. All you do is enter the medications you are taking:
The calculator automatically shows you the nutrients you will probably be losing:
In addition, Mytavin lets you know some of the symptoms you might experience as a result of your drug-induced nutrient depletion. If you look just to the right of the symptoms, you will see a little number that has a hyperlink. Those numbers send you to a Pubmed article showing you the science behind the drug-induced nutrient depletion.
Pubmed is the official website of the National Institute of Health (NIH). It is a great database of tons of medical and health studies and research.
Hopefully that explains how to use Mytavin. If you have any questions, please contact us.
Our Approach to Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion
We are big believers in good nutrition at A Paradise for Parents assisted living homes. The right food makes a huge difference in making sure your body has the right nutrients. That’s why we consult with a Naturopathic Doctor to design meals from scratch that help heal our residents.
If you would like to see what we do, please feel free to check out our website, email us, or call us at 623-295-9890.
We love our nurse Flor so much, we decided to put her picture on two different posts! We normally send out a notification to our favorite referral agents every Monday morning. Referral agents can be a godsend for a family struggling with assisted living decisions.
If you would like to meet some of our favorite referral agents, please don't hesitate to contact us on Facebook, our website, email us, or call 623-295-9890.
Arizona Department of Health regulations require that a contracted nurse or Doctor create 'service plans' for our residents. The service plans let us know what we need to do to keep our residents in the best shape they can.
Flor is the nurse for our Surprise homes. She updates the service plans for our residents every 3, 6 or 12 months depending the level of care the residents need. She also administers Tuberculosis tests to our staff if they need an annual test.
To learn more about how we provide care for our residents, please reach out to us on our website, email us, or call us at 623-295-9890. Thank you.
Vitamin D is so important to everyone, including our seniors. The best source of Vitamin D is the sun. So besides enjoying the beautiful neighborhood around our home on Banff Lane in Surprise, a 15 minute + walk can do wonders for your Vitamin D levels.
If you'd like to come to our home and check out the neighborhood, please contact us at our website, email us, or call us at 623-295-9890.
Do you know anyone who just seems to be angry all the time? Do you have a problem with anger? It might be something more than frustration at a person or situation. If it seems like someone becomes much angrier or outraged than makes sense for a given situation, they may have Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED).
Intermittent Explosive Disorder is a mental health condition that can cause a lot of problems. Both for the person who has it, and the people around them. The disorder usually starts in children and adolescents but can affect people their whole lives. It may still be present in older people. The outbursts, however, may not be as severe as when they were young.
How to Recognize Intermittent Explosive Disorder
People with IED may just think that it’s their personality to become angry easily. That doesn’t help if you’re the one with the problem and your anger is causing your relationships to fall apart.
Think about whether you or your loved one may have something more. You might want to look for some of the warning signs. IED symptoms include:
Outbursts that cause physical or emotional harm that seem way too much anger compared to what is going on
The anger seems to come out of nowhere, with little to no warning
The rage may appear in multiple different forms – typical of what you think of as an angry person:
Shouting
Fighting
Destroying some type of property
Threats – either directed to people or animals
Arguing
A temper tantrum (more in younger people)
Road rage
Episodes last around half an hour or less
After the episode is over, you may feel a sense of relief. Or you may just feel tired
People may be irritable, impulsive or just in a bad mood a lot of the other time
Before you think someone has Intermittent Explosive Disorder PTSD, you’d want to think about whether they have something else first. The anger may be due to something else like substance abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD or ADHD).
What Causes Intermittent Explosive Disorder?
In order to prevent or treat IED, it is important to understand what might be behind it. This isn’t just a sickness you catch from another person. The exact cause is unknown, although Doctors have been able to see some trends.
Family dynamics can play a large role. If someone grows up in a home where parents are angry and fighting all the time, they have a higher chance of showing the same behavior later on. Perhaps growing up in this kind of household means genetics may play some kind of role. If your parents are angry people, you might be the same way. Then again, it sure doesn’t help if that what you experienced as a child.
It follows that if you were abused as a kid – either physically or sexually – you have a higher risk of experiencing Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Any kind of traumatic event may also trigger IED for you.
Brain injuries or disruption of certain chemicals in the brain may also contribute. Other psychological conditions such as PTSD, Bipolar Disorder or traumatic brain injuries may also raise your chances of having IED as well.
Prevention of Intermittent Explosive Disorder
By the time someone is elderly, it may be too late to ‘prevent’ IED. That doesn’t mean it’s not too late to:
Use the following prevention techniques to assist in treating their disorder
Help their children or grandchildren prevent the problem
Prevention may not mean that you prevent it completely either. Using these techniques may ‘prevent’ the severity of your episodes. This affliction has the potential to ruin your relationships, cause significant harm to yourself or your loved ones, create financial burdens on your family or lead to other disorders such as depression. It’s worth minimizing to the max extent possible.
To make these techniques even more effective, you might want to consult with a professional. That doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t try them on your own as well.
The big idea is to do things that should help to minimize your anger. If you have some specific ways to calm yourself down, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below. Relaxation techniques will decrease the intensity of the episodes. It may also reduce the frequency.
Prevention Techniques:
Deep breathing to improve your mood– This video may give you some good ideas:
Yoga or meditation– Both exercises help reduce stress, which is associated with anger. According to the website Thrive Global:
“Anger and stress feed off each other. When you feel relaxed, you allow little things to happen. But as you feel the pressure piling on your shoulders, the tendency is to lash out your feelings at one point or another. Thankfully, yoga and meditation hold the key to a life with less anger and more peace. Sometimes, it feels as if you have no control over your emotions but being more aware of your inner self-makes it easier to change your behavior and how your mind works.”
Think about a situation differently– Psychologists call a form of this Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT, a Doctor will have you try to change bad thoughts such as when you make situations seem worse than they are. Instead they try to have you think more rationally. Sort of think “What’s the worst thing that could happen here?” Then it’s harder to fly off the handle. Try to think through the situation and what you can do to resolve it peacefully and rationally.
Listen. Maybe you can feel the anger welling up inside you. The outbursts from Intermittent Explosive Disorder will probably not allow you to listen to the other person. Can you force yourself to just be quiet and listen to the other person?
Listening will help the other person to calm down as well, if needed. In addition, it gives you more time to think about the situation rationally.
Solve the Problem– Use the last two techniques to help with this one. It may make sense to take what you thought about the situation and what you heard from the other party to come up with a solution. Thinking through the situation will also help dissipate the anger.
Get out of the situation – Walking away from the situation will help take your mind off it. Take a walk, a drive, or run some errands. Try not to think about what is going on. Take some time to cool off.
Stay away from drugs or alcohol – Any kind of mood-altering substances are only going to exaggerate your anger. Staying away from them in any area where there is potential conflict is a really good idea.
Treatments for Intermittent Explosive Disorder
Once you have been diagnosed with IED, you may want to seek professional help. Here are some of the treatments used according to the Harvard Mental Health Letter:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy– Although we mentioned CBT above, we emphasize it down here in a professional setting. The therapy is most effective when you work with a professional to apply it.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy– Originally developed to help people with Borderline Personality Disorder, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy(DBT) is a subset of CBT. There is a difference between CBT and DBT. DBT teaches people to acknowledge they have destructive emotions and then gives them skills to manage those emotions. Those skills include:
Emotion Regulation
Tolerance of Distress
Interpersonal Relationships
Meditation
Medications– Probably not the best way to treat Intermittent Explosive Disorder. However, people have achieved results with certain drugs. According to Harvard Medical School, some drugs that can be effective include the usual psychological cocktails. Some classes of drugs include antidepressants, anticonvulsants, Anti-anxiety drugs and mood stabilizers. Many of these drugs are common in seniors as well. Remember that these drugs have lots of side effects!
Group Therapy – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may be more effective in a group setting. Learning to interact with others. Seeing the behavior in others and feeling the peer pressure may help people control their emotions better.
Even if someone in your family is not officially diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, they can still have trouble controlling their anger. If you think it is more than it should be, maybe it’s time for that person to seek some help? We also have another postthat helps families resolve difficulties.
We want to thank all our referral agents who have helped so much in finding us such wonderful residents! We are full right now, but things change every week. So if you are interested in assisted living for your loved one, please don't hesitate to contact us through our website, email us at Cam@aparadiseforparents.com or call us at 623-295-9890.
We are also in the process of fixing up our home on 164th Lane. Among the changes we are making include:
New paint throughout
A new 75" Television for fun movie watching
New powerlift recliners
Please feel free to stop by. We'd love to see you!
We love working with Pammy's 2nd Chance Rescue. We foster Miya for them and we are about to bring in another dog to our home in Goodyear.
Our residents love the foster dogs. Most of the dogs are older and not so popular with young families and children. They are wonderful for our older residents though.
If you would like to meet Miya, please feel free to contact us. Either come to our website, email us at Cam@aparadiseforparents.com, or call us at 623-295-9890.
One of our most popular blog posts lists an overall plan for older people to stay out of a nursing home. Next to nutrition, one of the best ways to stay healthy is to exercise. Especially using resistance training exercises (weightlifting). You can find several blog posts on our site describing good exercises such as resistance band training, Tai Chi and chair exercises. With this blog post, I want to discuss a very effective exercise for seniors – “Super Slow” weight training.
You may or may not remember that Nautilus equipment that was so popular back in the 1970’s and 80’s. It was developed by a guy named Arthur Jones. Arthur was a real pioneer in exercise physiology. In addition to the equipment, Arthur also developed the idea of High-Intensity training.
We talked about High-Intensity training (HIT) a bit in our blog postof staying out of a nursing home. HIT exercises emphasize short bursts of very intense exercises. HIT can be some kind of aerobic (stationary bike, running, rowing machine etc.) or weight training,
On the aerobic side, you will want to go as fast as you can on your short bursts. For weight training, you will want to go as slow as possible. That’s why everyone calls it “Super Slow”.
Digging the Hole. How Super Slow Training Works
Super Slow weight training is both a more effective and time efficient method to increase strength for seniors than traditional weightlifting. That’s because Super Slow training focuses much more on the rest period for building up muscles than the actual exercising.
You should think of your weight training sessions as ‘digging a hole’ when you’re working your muscles. The training rips apart the tiny fibers in your muscles and breaks them down. The rest period is for your body to fill that hole back in and even add a pile on top of the hole. Some muscle fibers take a lot longer than others to recover. The amount of time it takes for all the muscles to fill the hole back in and build back is not quick. It can vary between 5 days and 6 weeks!
To dig the hole, it is important to maintain a load on the muscle during the entire set until failure. If you work out the old-fashioned way, you might tend to let the weight go a little during the rest phase of the set. Or you might rest the weights during the set, say on your chest for a bench press.
By lifting and lowering the weight in a ‘Super Slow’ manner, you will keep the load on your muscles for the entire set. You will also keep momentum from helping you with the lift. You will be much more effective digging that hole. Slow in this context means allowing at least 10 seconds for the extension of the weight and 10 seconds for the contraction.
You should not only go slow when you are lifting and lowering the weight. You should also not extend or contract your arms or legs fullyduring the exercise. If you are using a machine, don’t let the weights rest on the stack. For free weights, don’t rest the weight either on your body or the floor during the exercise.
Keep that load on until failure!
Once you are done with an exercise, move quickly to the next exercise. Remember you are digging that hole for your entire body and all muscles. Working one muscle group at a time still contributes to the fatigue of your entire body and the other muscle groups. Don’t take a lot of time between sets!
The Super Slow training session stimulates your body’s muscles to grow with just one set of repetitions. It’s not the number of repetitions you do. Instead it’s that you perform the repetitions until you can’t do any more. In other words, you do the exercise until failure. Several studiesshow that one ‘set’ of repetitions taken to failure is better than multiple sets of an exercise.
Benefits of Super Slow Weight Training
One of the proponents of Super Slow weight training did a studywith 75 elderly women with osteoporosis. He had them train for 8-10 weeks using the Super Slow exercise method. He also had a control group doing normal exercises with short, fast repetitions and not until failure.
The results were dramatic. The group that did the Super Slow exercises had a 50% increase in their strength compared to the control group. 50% is huge compared to the 3-5% weight loss seniors experience if they don’t exercise. It could allow elderly people to gain back a lot of the muscle mass they had previously lost.
The increases in strength make seniors a lot safer as well. Having more muscle and strength means seniors will have better balance and reduce their chances of falling.
Besides increasing safety when not training, Super Slow exercises are safer for the elderly when performing the workout. Weight training for seniors can be dangerous if not done correctly. Traditional weight training means lots of reps done quickly. The trouble with this type of training is the higher risk for injury.
Moving large weights quickly puts a lot of body parts at risk. Many of the most common weight lifting injurieshappen to the body parts around the muscle, not the muscles themselves. It’s the tendons, joints and bones that hurt. Many of these injuries come from repetitive motion. With Super Slow training, you have a lot less repetition. You are also avoiding the jerky motions that regular weight training may require.
The Big 5 – A Super Slow Workout
As with any workout, please make sure you discuss the new workout with your Doctor to make sure you are physically up to it. It may also be good to start these workouts with a trainer. Technique is important in these exercises and a trainer can really help you reach optimal results.
Here is a list of trainers who practice the Super Slow method. The first time I went to the Super Slow of Scottsdale gym, I met an 84 year-old woman who has been using this workout for several years. She was in great shape, walks 5 miles a day, and plays golf several times a week. It sure seems like this workout helps!
Doctor Doug McGuff is a big researcher and proponent of the Super Slow Exercise program. In his book ‘Body by Science’, he recommends five different exercises that cover the vast majority of musculature in your body:
Leg press
Some sort of rowing (pulling a weight to your abdomen)
A pull-down movement (pull ups or a pulldown machine that simulates pull ups)
Chest press (bench press)
Overhead press (military press or lifting something over your head)
Here is an example of Dr. McGuff performing a sample workout:
Try to use a weight that allows you to lift the weight to failure in anywhere from 45 seconds to 3 minutes. If you go longer than 3 minutes, then increase the weight. I normally put my iPhone in front of me for each set and set the countdown timer to help me push through the time I did in the previous workout.
Over time you will figure out what interval between workouts work for you. You may want to start with more frequency like 2-3 times per week. If you are not seeing gains from this workout after a couple of weeks, try increasing the rest time between workouts.
Remember that you build strength in the rest period, NOT during the workout!
Exercise is Important!
Regardless of what sort of weight training you do, it is important for seniors to do something! Sarcopeniais the term Doctors use to describe the process of muscle loss people experience as they age. It’s scary to think about. People start losing muscle naturally in their mid-thirties! If you’re not physically active, you can lose about 3-5% of muscle mass every decade.
Even if you do some weight training you will notice it is much harder to build muscle. Being in shape and having adequate muscle mass is especially important for our senior population. Healthy skeletal and muscular systems can help seniors in so many ways:
Reduce fall risk
Boost your immune system
Lower your risk of diabetes
Reduce osteoporosis
Ease arthritis
That’s why we have a personal trainerwho works with many of our residents. Our caregivers are also trained to perform daily exercises with our residents. Many of the residents report improvements in their overall health thanks to these exercises.
If you are interested in learning more about how we help our assisted living residents, please contact us. You can see the original post on our website here. We would be more than happy to answer your questions and possibly show you one of our homes. Please reach out us either through the front page of our website, email us at Cam@aparadiseforparents.com, or call 623-295-9890.
