Creative Programs: To Stimulate the Minds and Prolong Early Stage

Creative Programs: To Stimulate the Minds and Prolong Early Stagers in Early Stage. These need to be structured in such a way that they are social, creative, intellectually stimulating and such to capture a person still functional and in need of more than the distraction afforded by most day care programs.

I finished my last post with the preceding statement. What follows is elabortation.

The topic “What do Do” heading the list about creative programs to stimulate minds and prolong early stage AD includes a vast array!

1. One might argue why, why try to extend something so awful? The reasons are pretty fundamental.

There is a quality of life to be lived while you remain functional, reasonably cognitive, able to care for your self, on your own or with help, usually that of your caretaker, you are able to utilize your time to your advantage.

It saves cost. Each step down the ladder of regression takes more and more cost. It costs your caretaker the time dedicated having to see to your care. It costs for Home Care, someone coming in when your needs are beyond your caretaker. Outside sources of help and institutional help exponentially increases this cost.

It is your own funds that pay, yours and your spouses until you run out. Then the community and the country will kick in. The overall increase in the cost of care explodes as the baby boomers come of senior age which just started this year.

Institutional cost is inexcusably high. The silent years, the last 30, have seen a phenomenal shift in the ownership in wealth. This comes about in part by the way the economic/political system has bent the profits up to serve the rich and bent the cost which creates this profit up, even higher, which the rest of us pay, one of which is to the Nursing Home.

The longer we stay at home the less cost we incur for our families, our community, and our country.

2. Economy in Care should become our mantra, our slogan for political challenge. The success of this effort saves our country from economic bankruptcy sure to happen as soon as the “Boomers” start entering the Nursing Home en Masse.

Idle threat or scare mongering this is not! The statistics are there to support it.

Said in the a previous post “Fix it or leave it be” it bears repeating again:

Alzheimer’s Boomers Report – 2011 Generation Alzheimer’s The Defining Disease of The Baby Boomers, page 3:

·        In 2010, Alzheimer’s and other dementias cost American society — families, insurers and the government — $172 billion.

·        In 2050, those costs will increase to over $1 trillion (in current dollars).

·        Over the next 40 years, Alzheimer’s will cost America over $20 trillion, enough to pay off the national debt and still send a $20,000 check to every man, woman and child in America.

·        Between 2010 and 2050, the costs to Medicare of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s will increase over 600 percent — and the cost to families in out-of-pocket costs will grow more than 400 percent.

·        A person with Alzheimer’s disease on average, costs Medicare three times more someone without the disease.

There is no way the crippled economy of our country will be able to handle this, less likely will any other units of government be able to do so. Between the wars, the deficits, the collapse of the economy in 2008, the listless recovery that has followed, putting all of this with the affects of AD, the effect of it on everyone in this country; the sum of it will be our inability to meet the emergency. This truly adds up to an Armageddon like event in the making.

There is no recourse remaining. None, unless we find another way to provide for the consequences of what is soon to happen. It is at this time we must make the assessment.

Is the wheel broken? Can it be fixed? If not can we replace it?

There is hope, there are ways. We will explore formulas for finding Economy in Care

3. Is it possible to prolong Early Stage for sake of Economy?

The answer is as simple as it is brief:

It certainly is; it is feasible; it is worth doing.

This subject was alluded to in the post Creative Programs, a God-Send for Surviving the Ravages of AD Longer at the end of which I listed brain plasticity or Neurogenesis. These are two of the names used to describe the working capacity of the brain to regenerate lost synapses, to find new pathways and generally regenerate itself.

This topic has just become hot topic. There are many discussions and reports being circulated at this time.

This is the end product of programs done for the purpose of stimulating the brain to regenerate. There are so many programs available. Some are as simple as social programs, brain games and clubs for brain stimulation. In between these are physical programs, myriad art music and other creative and skill oriented programs, educational, intellectual, fun, an example being bridge.

The list will not stop. The results are even more endless, the good of it is both in providing Quality of Life for us and saving cost for everyone else.

I will discuss this in more detail in the next posts.