subject: Living Longer With Nursing Homes And Medical Advances [print this page] The idea that people can live for as long as they do receiving regular dialysis treatment is nothing less than a miracle. Most of us know someone who has had their lives saved on a regular basis by the use of dialysis treatment. Kidney dialysis of course is no picnic in and of itself. That said the alternative is excruciating physical pain and inevitable death, things being what they are this is the sort of medical miracle that the last hundred or so years have made possible and it is nothing to sneeze at.
These days the advances in medical technology have gone far beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors just fifty or a hundred years ago. As we live longer and longer and treatments like kidney dialysis, heart bypasses, transplants, and many others become more and more common so too does living well into your ninth or tenth decade. As this has occurred there has been a lot of growth in the medical world and in the world of elderly care. Everything from home health aids to nursing homes have become far more common than they ever were back in the day. Many of our great grandparents, owing to family history or a general impending sense of mortality, likely never considered what being ninety might be like, yet for us it is something that is entirely plausible and increasingly likely.
One thing that medical science can not stop completely is the erosion over time of our organs, bones, muscles and bodies overall. As we get older just as we gray and bald we also begin to feel the burn and burden of our earlier exploits. The knees go do to an old football injury, the hip starts to ache perhaps owing to one too many dances to "The Twist," heart takes a licking from our high cholesterol diets. As these things happen there are now major operations to help deal with them and what is more there is a developed curriculum of both long term and short term rehab therapy depending on your situation showing you how to once again move use your body after major surgery.
The startling and surprising thing about these advances is that many are still very new and all of them are still evolving. As we move forward we get healthier and live happier, all of which leads to us living longer. These days people do not dream of meeting the grandchildren. They hold and play with the grandchildren while dreaming of meeting the great grandchildren.
