Episode 6: Let's Talk About the Paradox of Caring for Aging Parents
The following is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 6 of the Treat Us Right podcast with links to relevant content.
Run time: 13:41
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Welcome to the Treat Us Right Podcast. I’m your host, David Williams, CEO of Karen Health Services. I want to first thank you for the incredibly supportive feedback from our last episode. It was hard. It was raw. The same biases that lead to racial inequality in criminal justice extend to healthcare through lack of representation of people of color in medical research. We should all have ready-access to our personal health information so the healthcare system can always customize treatments to our needs. Especially in the COVID-19 era. Treat Us Right as a title is deliberate—and I promise to continue to unapologetically use this platform to move the world towards healthcare equality.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about something that you don’t want to. It’s not something you discuss at cocktail parties. It’s not social media friendly. We’re going to talk about caring for our parents as they age.
First, let’s look at the data.
According to The Caregiving in the US 2020 Report by The National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, 48 million are specifically providing unpaid care for an adult with health or functional needs. An additional 5 million Americans provide UNPAID care for a child with special needs. I’m definitely in that group.
What this data says is if you’re managing and delivering care for a loved one, you’re not alone.
Despite all of these people, it’s REALLY easy to avoid discussions about caring for our parents. They’re our heroes, right? Watching them age and having to take care of them is an entirely new challenge. You’re balancing your job, children and taking care of your parents. You try so hard to keep it all together. But it’s stressful. And it can be physically and emotionally overwhelming.
I hear that. I've been there.
I cared for my mom for ten years prior to her passing and have a son with severe autism. I know the stress of managing it all.
I know the guilt when things go wrong.
I know the anger when other family members don’t help.
I know the loneliness, helplessness—and hopelessness.
You have days when you ask yourself, can I really handle all of this?
Yes. Yes, you can.
What if I told you there is a not-so-secret roadmap to successfully caring for your parent and staying sane in the process? Would you believe me? The roadmap doesn’t reverse time or magically cure chronic disease. But it does give you enough time in the day to live your life while also doing the things that lead to better care and higher quality of life for your parent.
OK. Are you ready for the not-so-secret roadmap? It’s actually a paradox.
Data = Time.
The secret is planning and documenting your parent’s health experience. What happens each day. What they feel. What medications they take. Their daily exercise. In some cases, capturing what and when they eat matters. The goal is to create data—information from daily experience.
Immediately, I know you’re thinking, this is MORE work, not less. I have to cook the food and write down what my parent ate? I have to go on the daily walk and capture how far and how long? I have to write down everything that happens? How does that help me?
Under normal circumstances, you would be right. This would be MORE work. MORE time-consuming. But this is where the paradox becomes true. The more data you collect, the more time you get.
You’re already delivering the care. You’re already struggling to get everything done because it seems there aren’t enough hours in the day. Documenting daily experience is essential for your parent’s health (and your sanity) in two ways:
1. Getting the Most Effective Treatments from Doctors
You can share this real-world experience data with your parent’s doctors so they know what’s going on. Capturing all of my mom’s health experiences, and sharing that information with all of her doctors, helped them provide better care. With her previous cancers, COPD, heart failure and other conditions, she had many doctors. And one of the things that is so hard is getting all of them to consider what the others are doing in developing treatment plans.
But they had to know what my mom was experiencing in order to give her the best care. That information doesn’t just magically appear out of nowhere. We documented, by hand, all of her health experiences and shared them with her doctors—on paper. I planned out how to do it so it could fit with my busy schedule. THAT was the key for me.
Doctors need to know what’s happening to customize treatment plans, to know what medications are working and not, to deliver better care. Right now, they rely on your memory or that of your parent to decide how to proceed. With data, you help them optimize care decisions from what really happened. And that helps you because your parent feels better faster. They’re more functional. They can do more. And when your parent can do more, you do less. Your time frees up. Your stress is reduced. Data = Time.
2. Your Care is More Effective
Translating the experience into data doesn’t just help the doctors. It helps you. You get to see what works in real-time. You can give a medication at 5pm instead of 3pm because giving it later helps your parent sleep at night. You can see that eating right after exercise makes them feel better longer. Anything that helps your parent feel better frees up your time—and reduces your stress. There are endless stories of providing optimal care frees up time and reduces stress. That can be true for you.
So now the trick is how can you plan and document the care and experience quickly and easily for maximum effect in the least amount of time?
This is where becoming a Karen Health Member will change your life.
We help you:
1. Make your care plan
2. Easily and quickly document health experience over time
3. See what works with real-time charts
4. Make data shareable with doctors and family
We do all of that for you to reduce time and stress.
This is why I named my company and platform, Karen Health, after my mom. This is what she did. This is what we did to get her from being in the hospital 14 times in a year to zero times over the next year. To where she lived the last two and half years of her life in her home. Karen Health makes it easy for people to capture all that critically important health experience and translate it into useful information—and do it in only a few minutes a day. THAT’s the key.
In just a few minutes a day, you can capture information that totally explains what's happening with your parent. And then when you need that data, whether it's for the next doctor visit with a PCP or specialist, or an emergency happens, you have that data. You have a full view of what has happened over time, not just for one condition, but everything. And the doctors will use that data to give your parent better treatment and better care. You will save time and your parent’s quality of life will improve. That frees up time for you and reduces your stress level.
You can take action, too. You can do things that will improve your parent’s quality of life from the information collected. You can lose that feeling of being so reactive to every little thing that happens. You have a plan. You have a way to drive activities that improve your parent’s life. And that feels good. That reduces stress.
One other benefit of being a Member of Karen Health Services
One of the things that's so hard when you're caring for a loved one is that you get burned out. You’re doing so much, and you're a Saint for it, but at the same time, you're not superhuman. You need a break. You need help.
We help you bring all of your support together into the Karen Health app. If you have adult siblings, they want to know what's going on. So we make it easy for you to add them to the app in a group so they can see everything that's happening. But they can also by default help with things that can take them off of your list. And that's also how you reduce your stress. Getting people to help even when they don’t expect to. It’s not sneaky when it’s family.
That's what the Karen Health Services membership does. We help you create an automated plan that helps you track information that's relevant to your parent, makes it easy for you to capture that information. And be able to share it. That’s what we do. And then also to manage the appointments, manage, manage all of the tasks that have to get done. And it's all in one place.
So what I want you to do is become a Member of Karen Health Services. An annual membership is $99 for one to two people. For a family up to nine people, it's $300 a year.
As a reminder, we help you:
1. Make your care plan for each member of your
2. Easily and quickly document health experience and translate it into actionable data
3. See what works with real-time charts
4. Make data shareable with doctors and family
Become a Karen health services member. We can help you live your best life while you're caring for those you love. Join us at www.yeskaren.com/services. Thank you and we’ll see you next time on the Treat Us Right podcast.