How We Age: A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Growing Old Review

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(More customer reviews)Dr Marc Agronin, who specialises in geriatric psychology in Miami, has written a memoir about his medical practice. It's a small book, with many short chapters of personal anecdotes, about how the mind ages and how different sorts of dementia, including Alzheimers', can be treated. This is not a "how-to" book, giving exercises that may postpone the advent of aging, but rather a look at how aging proceeds in the brain and how caregivers and medical professionals can best care for the aged, who are, of course, our parents, our siblings, our friends, and, eventually, ourselves.
Aging is rather like death-and-taxes, a part of life. We're all aging but Dr Agronin writes about good ways to adjust to the process in ourselves and our loved ones. In many cases, with the aid of new diagnoses and medication, Dr Agronin and his staff, have been able to help many patients who he has treated. And with others, Dr Agronin has helped to ease what are the emotional pains of aging - the remembrances that have been locked into their minds for many years. In one case cited by Dr Agronin, a music therapist worked through uncommunicative woman's only method of communication - verbal "clicks" - to recognise that she was "clicking" to a song that she and her late husband had loved. Her mind, almost totally closed by Alzheimers', had retained that song and that connection to a much-loved husband.
Dr Agronin's book is also a loving testimony to his family. Marc Agronin is a third-generation doctor and he writes that the memories he shared of his grandfather have helped him to be able to feel the compassion he does for his elderly patients. He also cites other professionals in his field, including Erik and Joan Erikson and Sophia Freud, with whom he has worked and studied.
A very good book, written for the lay person.

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In the tradition of Atul Gawande and Sherwin Nuland, Marc Agronin writes luminously and unforgettably of life as he sees it as a doctor. His beat is a nursing home in Miami that some would dismiss as "God's waiting room." Nothing in the young doctor's medical training had quite prepared him for what he was to discover there. As Agronin first learned from ninety-eight-year-old Esther and, later, from countless others, the true scales of aging aren't one-sided-you can't list the problems without also tallying the hopes and promises. Drawing on moving personal experiences and in-depth interviews with pioneers in the field, Agronin conjures a spellbinding look at what aging means today-how our bodies and brains age, and the very way we understand aging.