"Nothing, it's too late."

Ronni Bennett delivers unwelcome news and a  whole lot of numbers from as well as a good exegesis of  Atul Gawade's piece in The New Yorker on The Way We Age Now

There will not be enough doctors trained in geriatrics to deal with us aging boomers.    There's not enough now. 

Seems as if the number of geriatricians is declining while the number of plastic surgeons is rising.    Doctors just don't want to deal with "Old Crocks" which is what we all will be given enough time.

Even if we stop obsessing on how well we look, and start focusing on how well we are, we're out of luck and on our own.  When asked whether enough geriatricians could be trained to serve the booming elder population, Chad Boult, professor at John Hopkins said,

"Nothing, it's too late."

Read Ronni's post  but don't miss the Gawade piece to get the full flavor of what we individually and as a society are avoiding, the certainty of our decrepitude and the words of a wonderful writer.

Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even the lungs pick up substantial deposits of calcium and turn stiff. Under a microscope, the vessels and soft tissues display the same form of calcium that you find in bone. When you reach inside an elderly patient during surgery, the aorta and other major vessels often feel crunchy under your fingers. A recent study has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels. As we age, it’s as if the calcium flows out of our skeletons and into our tissues.
---
Decline remains our fate; death wil come. But, until that last backup system inside each of us fails, decline can occur in two ways. One is early an  precipitately, with an old age of enfeeblement and dependence, sustained primarily by nursing homes and hospitals. Th  other way is more gradual, preserving, for as long as possible, your ability to control your own life

Is it hopeless? Are we all doomed?  Not if Chad Boult can get geriatricians to train primary care doctors to treat the very old.  But that's a tall order given that today, 97% of medical students take no course in geriatrics, 97%!

Frankly, I have a lot more hope in Gould's backup plan called "Guided Care" which calls for nurses to be given a highly compressed, three-week course in  making geriatric care plans for individual patients and working with patients, families and doctors to implement the plans.

I count myself very lucky that my sister Colleen, a nurse, plans to become a certified nurse practitioner to work with us future "old crocks."