Caregiving

Anyone who’s a family caregiver understands the huge array of responsibilities that can arise from that relationship: physical health, emotional well being, medications, and of course all of the logistics, to name a few. But there are also challenges that involve legal considerations. Being informed may save you, and your loved…

Continuing the theme of conversations with physicians about health care decision making, especially at the end of life: such advance care planning becomes all the more complex and challenging when there’s no clear person to step in to be a surrogate decision maker should something happen to you. Typically, patients…

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg knows all too well what it means to lose a loved one: her husband died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2015. Having been through that experience, she has become a champion for promoting leave from work to deal with family illness or crisis. And last week, Facebook…

As we get older, we all experience the inevitable difficult times in life: illness arises, loved ones pass away, losses engulf us. These are challenging experiences, both for those going through them and for those who want to be of help. It’s sometimes hard to know what to say or…

Professional health care providers don’t always acknowledge the enormous contributions that unpaid family caregivers provide to patients, especially as they grow older. So the recent New York Times piece by Dr. Dhruv Khullar, in which he comes to recognize the value of, and burden on, family caregivers, is an important…

Whether you embrace or reject the role of being a grandparent, research has emerged that might influence your perspective: A new study from Berlin has documented that grandparents, or really any older people, who provide occasional caregiving help for their grandchildren have a 1/3 lower risk of dying than those…