4 ms·
I have some experience with this through family and friends. It's easy to make moral proclamations before spending literally decades attending to somebody with
by redis_mlc 6y ago
I have some experience with this through family and friends.
It's easy to make moral proclamations before spending literally decades attending to somebody with dementia/vegetation, or other chronic conditions. Wasting your own life on somebody who isn't all there is not a great trade-off if there's other options.
(My friend inherited a $2 million house for taking care of his gravely ill elderly relative, but that cost him 20 years of his life and meant he couldn't have a career, family or life outside the house. So a double tragedy.)
Having said that, there are reasons to be concerned about US nursing homes ...
US nursing homes are incentivized on many levels to sedate their normally active patients:
1) easier to control patients with less staff
2) paid for administering the sedative (daily or more frequently)
3) paid for the sedative.
So care bills can be inflated with no benefit to the patient paying for it.
- foo_barrio 6y agoUnfortunately that incentive exists at home too. I, with my mom, were the primary caretakers of my father with dementia. Without any kind of sedation he was actually more mentally aware but also prone to violence, yelling, sprinting (if in the house easy to trip). On the sedative he was more manageable but also clumsier and more prone to slipping and falling. Overall I'd rather deal with that than having to be a referee between him and my mom!
- redis_mlc 6y agoNote that you're talking about a reasonable medical use of sedatives that your own family decided upon. I was mainly talking about non-medical, billing-only use of sedatives decided by home administrators when the family is not around to make an informed decision. If you're not outraged, you should re-read the above paragraph again. That's been reported in local SV newspapers and online.