Aging Healthcare System

It is New Year's Eve. And I have time to blog-- some might call it ranting. I invite you to blog along and rant away with me in the fresh new days ahead.

Every Monday the daily paper runs a special section devoted to lifestyles and human interest, "Health and Fitness." A calendar is routinely included and community organizations, businesses and visiting conferences can post an announcement under "Fitness Events" or "Health Events." Today's calendar includes an announcement listed under "Health Events," and titled: "Look Great in 2008" I feel compelled to take a stand on this matter today. I am a registered nurse and I have strong feelings about the responsibility of the health care industry to truly care for the health of people.

The announcement is an invitation to drive out where our city's money lives (and practices medicine) around Wolf River Boulevard. We can attend a free seminar led by a plastic surgeon and the owner of a laser surgery center, a spa. These two well paid professionals will freely tell us about surgical and nonsurgical options for a more youthful appearance. In order for these two professionals to be paid, we first have to buy into their value system. It would seem they value their increasingly high income. And, it would seem, they prefer that we do our part, as pitiful aging schmucks, to keep gravity from pulling down our jowls and gluteal regions. It is a masterful exercise in illusions and conartistry. Let's be clear... neither health nor fitness are accurate headings for this posted announcement. It's a chance to take advantage of the fact that some of us are afraid of looking like ourselves.

For twenty five years I worked as a registered nurse. I took care of human beings in acute care settings. For ten years I listened to people who came to treatment because addictions had taken over the best part of their lives. For three years I bathed and turned people who had experienced severe head trauma. For three years I assisted five gastroenterologists in a practice where people made appointments to talk about and be treated for gut pain and dysfunction. I gave medicine to inpatient psychiatric people for two years. The most healing part of their treatment plan was the listening, sitting down and taking time to hear their stories and the stories told by their family members. I worked for a year in a weight-loss clinic. Here I saw first-hand how fear can be exploited for profit. I worked for two years on a stroke rehab unit and learned to highly respect the physical therapists and their practice. I worked for three years on a neurosurgery unit where life threatening tumors and blood clots were removed from the brains of people who got better, some for the rest of their lives and some for a while. Some surgery is miraculous in its capacity to improve the quality of life. I worked for one year as a hospice nurse, visiting and listening to people who were dying at home with their familiar things, their friends and family close by. That's when I went to seminary and earned my degree; then went to a Clinical Pastoral Education Program in a hospital to learn more about myself and how I can help people who suffer.

Here's my point: People rarely see how valuable they are in their own family and community. We rarely understand how much power we have to heal ourselves and each other. (Imagine for a minute what our world might be like if the medical profession focused on empowering human beings rather than holding power over us in our paper gowns as if we were children and they our benevolent fathers.) We are trained from birth to discount the value of our own gifts, to long for what we do not have, to envy those who fit the silver-screen standard for physical perfection. We want to belong to the popular crowd in school. We want to drive the expensive vehicle and make a statement in the car-pool line up. We shop, shop, shop in an effort to purchase that one glorious item off the shelf that will assure us of our worthiness. I am in the same soup pot as the rest of my neighbors and friends and family. I lived with an eating disorder for eighteen years, vomiting up every bite that dared to cling to my stomach walls in an effort to stay thin and acceptable to the God of Great Beauty. I had to weigh one hundred pounds or less in order to qualify for the air it would take to breathe my next breath.(For two years I ate lettuce only and for sixteen years I ate cookies and cakes with pie and ice-cream-- then vomited.) I did not die but it was not because I didn't try to kill myself for the sake of staying thin. I know the cost of buying into the illusions and conartistry that pads the pockets of advertisers, designers, retailers, and unscrupulous health care providers. As human beings, we have the power to look in the mirror and see what great effort has gone into our existence. We are each a storehouse of possibility and hope. Each one of us is creative, gifted with treasures to invent new ways to make life better for ourselves and the next generation.

Finding those treasures within ourselves can take time and sometimes therapy-- but rarely if ever-- does it take surgery. Most often the treasure is discovered after our muscles have weakened, our bones have become less sturdy and our vision is not as keen as it once was. Aging is not a disease. Aging is a privilege and a significant part of our human development. Aging adds value to our communities. It is a crime to distract human beings from the real and honorable experience of aging with grace and dignity. As if we didn't pay our dues in high school to the prom king and queen debacle. It is a crime to imply that forcing skin and bones to look like they did years ago has anything to do with health care. The universities that train our doctors know better. Doctors are educated in institutions of higher learning, not in some day long seminar for shysters. Graduates from medical schools ought to be the ones in the front lines, teaching people the value of life itself. Evidence based practice teaches that people grow wiser with age and they can take better care of themselves in their wisdom years if the health care professinals provide good life sustaining education. Not cosmetic surgery that tells the person, "You would still be a woman if you just looked more like Julia Roberts." Or else, "I could still call you a man if you looked something like Brad Pitt." Good healthcare education would prepare people to expect their skin to sag at a time in their lives when wisdom prevails. At a time in their lives when they have the most to give the rest of us.

We are beautiful. We always were. We always will be. We are creatures created in the image of God. That means Perfect Love lives in us and longs to be shared. No plastic surgeon can touch that or improve upon it. But it can grow sweeter and stronger with age-- if we do not lose our way by focusing on the little folds of skin around our eyes instead of the great vision that swells from our soul.

In his book, The Force of Character: The Lasting Life, John Hillman says that our later years confirm and fulfill our character. "In Japan, bowing the upper body is not simply a mannered postural greeting, a show of deference. It is also a practice that builds the ancestor into one's framework. Old people are supposed to be bent over like stalks of ripe rice. Our culture [unfortunately] sees only osteoporosis. We see the body, but not its instruction. Or we get one bare message only: We're heading for the grave."
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I feel sick when I hear of doctors taking advantage of people's misinformed fears. Look great in 2008? Let's look like ourselves and share from the best within us. Our bodies do sag with age. We change. We grow older as the years come and go. It is a good thing to look our age. It informs the youngsters, lets them know who they should turn to when they need things like truth, justice and hope.