Doctor crusades for radical new approach to aging [video]
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How often have you heard someone mocked for trying to “stay young”? How many times have you admired someone for not seeming their age?
On the one hand, we as a society are obsessed with youth despite a rapidly-aging demographic, yet when we encounter someone who’s young at heart and not ashamed of a few wrinkles and gray hairs we applaud what no amount of plastic surgery is able to accomplish.
Professor and physician Bill Thomas has spent decades trying to turn the tides of elder care for the better, first through instituting new practices in nursing homes, then evangelizing his radical new approach to the masses to spur a cultural shift.
As the Washington Post explained:
For the past two years, he has traveled the country on a mission to raise public consciousness — strumming a guitar and presenting a stage show that touts a “post-adulthood” period when age and experience are associated with enrichment rather than decrepitude.
He believes that his generation, which reinvented what it means to be young, should now be reinventing what it means to grow old. “We need to get people out of hospitals, we need to create a rich set of community-based alternatives.” In essence, he argues, the goal is “normalizing the entire lifespan instead of separating and stigmatizing one part as something different.”
When he left the ER to head a nursing home, the despair of these purgatories before purgatory spurred him to flaunt the law and literally bring life to these residences in the form of gardens and animals. Residents started doing more for themselves, their medications were cut, and aging didn’t seem so meaningless anymore.
“It’s very American language — ‘You’re as young as you feel, and I feel like I’m 22 years old.’ That’s not good, that’s not right . . . and the reason it’s wrong is it doesn’t allow you to be who you are.”
The question is, are we ready to age gracefully? Or better yet, wouldn’t we all want to live as rich a life as possible until the curtain goes down? It’s never too late to start working for the change we wish to see in the world…and our own lives down the road.
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