Johns Hopkins geriatrician Colleen Christmas discusses how ageism in the health care setting can impact patients. Research shows a 7.5-year gain in life expectancy when views of aging are positive in health care settings. She encourages clinicians to be aware of the messages they may be sending to their older patients. Watch a longer version of this talk here.
George Burns, the legendary cigar smoking comedian who lived to be a little over 100 years old, once said, if you want to live to be 100 then you can't act like you're dying at 65. I'm calling Christmas a geriatric medicine physician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. And I'm grateful to have a word with you about ageism and the ways we harm people in medicine and in society when we act like the lives of people lose value as they age. Ageism is defined by the World Health Organization as discrimination against older people due to negative and inaccurate stereotypes. It's believed to be the most pervasive and socially accepted acceptable form of discrimination and it's so socially acceptable that many people don't even recognize that it's all around us. Ageism is sending us the messages that as you get older, you become smaller, invisible, weak, ugly, useless, burdensome, impotent, and cognitively impaired. The losses that accompany aging are generally exaggerated and the gifts of aging are unrecognized. We're taught to fear and dread getting older as though aging is only about loss. Indeed, there's a huge industry, banking on us during aging have you ever tried to go into a grocery store and buy facial moisturizer? They're all labeled with the same word anti-aging. Similarly, if you're trying to purchase a, a birthday card, they're making fun of getting older and TV shows commercials, late night TV, every single day, send messages that aging is awful and to be made fun of. In fact, researchers have shown that the degree to which one experiences ageism is directly related to important health outcomes such as physical and mental health and the prevalence of uh chronic conditions. In other studies, researchers have shown that harboring more negative views of aging predicted higher rates of cardiovascular events decades later. And in another study, it was shown that while having more positive use of aging confirmed, conferred a 7.5 year increase in life expectancy, we know that more positive views of aging are associated with lower risk of dementia, better recovery from illness, lower blood pressure and better participation and preventative health interventions. In an incredibly fascinating study. Researcher, Rebecca Levy and colleagues demonstrated that by bringing older adults into the lab once a week for four weeks and by flashing subliminal words messages, they could not only change the views these people had about aging, but these change of views then converted into gains in physical function in the eight weeks that followed the subliminal message intervention. So what's the truth about aging? But like in any phase of life, there are good aspects and there's challenges. We often think of being a young child is being the happiest time in life when you're four, you're hanging out on the playground with your friends. You've never heard of a bill, but you might have to eat your peas and you can't drive a car yet. We act as though Children are not only inherently valuable but that they are universally happy and as though older adults are lack value and are miserable. And we know for research, if we keep telling older adults this, we make this more likely to be true. So I encourage all of you in health care to check the messages you're sending people who count on you to promote their best health possible. While most organ function does indeed decline with aging, usually this actually starts in early adulthood in your twenties and thirties and the impacts of these declines are exaggerated, often clinically irrelevant to older adults. The last several decades have demonstrated a remarkable expansion and not just lifespan but in health span. So people are living healthier for longer and longer and that's worthy of celebration. The declines in cognition and functional status that we see that we often associate with aging actually are far more impacted by socially constructive factors such as race, ethnicity and educational attainment with genetics and chronological age. Actually having quite a small influence. Unless you forget there are gifts of aging too. We know that experience a masses over time meaning that older adults tend to be wise, problem solvers. They have more mature emotional regulation and clarified value sets that inform their decision making. Creativity continues to grow at every age without tapering off. And older adults describe the comfort of more fully becoming their authentic selves. Happiness is a U shaped curve. So join me, won't you in challenging ages and when you hear it or see it, it's good for your patients as they age and it's good for all of us too. Thank you.
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