Talking about death doesn't make it happen, yet so many of us are afraid that this will be the case. Join MSW, Kent Mathews, as he discusses the differences in palliative care, hospice, what Medicare may pay for and how families can ask for help.
Aging with Altitude is recorded in the Pikes Peak region with a focus on topics of aging interest across the country. We talk about both the everyday and novel needs and approaches to age with altitude whether you’re in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida or Leadville, Colorado. The Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging is the producer. Learn more at Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging.
Transcript:
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Michaela Nichols:
Hello and thank you for listening to Aging with Altitude, a podcast series elevating the issues that matter. This series is produced by the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments Area Agency on Aging. Today’s episode is about end of life issues. My name is Michaels Nichols and I’m here with Kent Mathews. Kent is a care manager in the Family Caregiver Support Center at the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging. He has over 27 years of experience as a social worker and has worked in hospice care as well. End of life issues can often be hard to talk about. Many people hope that they will be able to make their own decisions or that a loved one will be able to make their own decisions toward the end of their life, but in many cases they lose that ability so being unprepared can put loved ones in uncomfortable positions. So can you talk a little bit about what barriers individuals experience when beginning to make end of life plans?
Kent Mathews:
The most common barrier I hear coming from caregivers when I was doing hospice work coming from even hospice patients was when it comes to like the advanced directives, they would say well I’ll execute them. I’ll fill them out when I need them not knowing that they probably wouldn’t be able to execute them when they needed them because they would be like in a physical state where they were unresponsive, couldn’t speak or something like that where they wouldn’t be able to even begin to fill out those documents. So I think that’s one barrier. Another one is we don’t like to think about our end of life. We don’t like to think about our deaths, and we live in a very death aversive society. Generations ago when we were still a very rural society and weren’t as urbanized as we are now, and still a lot of people living on the farms or out in nature and what not, we were still very much in touch with the cycle of creation. Earth, life, death. All of that. And now, we’re really, really removed from that. And so that’s a huge barrier as well. I think another barrier that comes to mind is, people don’t have an easy place to go to get good information about what’s really going on with their physical condition. I recently ran across a statistic that said that if asked to do a treatment and a doctor knew that the treatment wouldn’t do any good for you, 40% of doctors still said they would recommend the treatment, which is in my estimation is just rather appalling that they would even do that. So a lot of times people rely on their doctors to give them that information to tell them what’s really going on, but most doctors aren’t equipped to do that. They don’t have the skills to do that. They may have the knowledge, but they don’t know how to communicate that in a way that is comfortable for them and therefore makes their patients comfortable. Everybody’s kind...
