Grandma Zhao's Story
Grandma Zhao, who is 78 years old. She was suffering from hypertension, coronary heart disease, cerebral infarction and eye disease, so she has to take medicine every day, and often have to go to see a doctor.
But the physical illness did not affect her mood. In daily life, she always get up before 6am in the morning, and goes to the park near her house for doing morning exercises. Then goes to the vegetable market to buy vegetables and back home, she said that she has been keep doing morning exercises for about 20 years, she firmly believes that it is do well to us physically and mentally.
After breakfast, she likes to reading newspaper and flicking through some magazines, glancing through the news of the day, she is very concerned about current events. She said:
"Even I'm getting old, but the world changes every day, I don’t want live isolated lives in my own little world. It's never too old to learn."
In the afternoon, she usually hang out with other old ladies, take a walk, have a chitchat, etc.
Grandma Zhao also really cares about health preserving and her physical condition. She has 2 notebooks that collected all kinds of health care knowledge and the general knowledge of diseases that she has. She wants to tell the elderly people that
the disease is irreversible, but you can prevent it from getting worse. Elderly people with problems all over the body are actually a normal thing, all we can do is adjust well the mental condition, have a positive attitude for treatment.
The Current Status
China has become the country with the largest elderly population in the world. The medical cost burden of China's old people increase rapidly with age. It can be seen that old people have more diseases with more severe conditions and need to cost more resources. Therefore, aging of population highlights problems of treatment of old people increasingly.
According to statistics by Ministry of Health, the prevalence rate of chronic disease of elderly people aged over 60 years old are 3.2 times of the prevalence rate of all people, their disability rate is 3.6 times of that of all people and medical resources used by the aged are 1.9 times of that by all people. Old people's illness is characterized by high morbidity, numerous patients with chronic diseases, coexistence of multiple diseases, multiple complications, quick change of conditions and long-term dysfunction etc. The three difficulties of old people's treatment are: their failure of standing, crowding and waiting. With impending of aging society, difficulty of getting medical service will become old people’s main mental disturbance. The aged is of high age, poor body quality, many diseases and high treatment difficulty. Therefore, community hospitals and small clinics keep the aged a respectful distance for fear of taking risks. However, seeking medical advice in a big hospital needs to take buses, queue up, receive inspections and pay fees. It is difficult for the aged to stand, wait and bear. As a result, the phenomenon of "delaying small illness and enduring serious illness"appeared.
Doctor's Saying
Professor Chenguang from The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University said, I am a physician and worked in the department of endocrinology and metabolism. I feel the number rising of elderly patients in my career, especially in recent ten years. The most of diseases that the patients, who come to see me, suffer from is diabetes. As you know, diabetes is a kind of life-long disease, once you get it. So far, doctor has got no way to cure it thoroughly. Change life-style and take medicine is equivalent important.
I worry about elder people's compliance with doctor’s advice. One of reasons is because of elder patients usually had their own life-style which is relatively stable. For sure, another reason is that they usually have somewhat disability due to ageing and disease also, such as poor memory, poor eye-sight, poor hearing and reducing cognitive ability. They may forget of taking medicine or injecting wrong number of insulin.
Elder patient's another problem is poor self-care ability, including the way of going to hospital, relative weak of paying bill to medical insurance, etc. So, government, society, hospital, family member and doctor should work together, give hand to elderly people. Government’s policy making should take aged tendency of population for attention, offer more socialized service to them. The devices of public traffic should consider their requirement, volunteers may offer more home aids to them; Doctor can take more reachable consulting services and monitoring instrument by network technique.
I used to speaking slowly and clearly to the elder patient, and I also used to let them repeat my advice when they said everything is OK. Children can help gather all kinds of medicine pill（tablets）for each-take in one box for their elder parents. Based on "evidence-based medicine", doctor usually gave simple therapies for patient with cognitive ability problem.
