Leslie Kernisan - When Your Aging Parent Needs Help: A Geriatricians Step-by-Step Guide to Memory Loss, Resistance, Safety Worries, & More

Praise For
When Your Aging Parent Needs Help

With its handy checklists (downloadable cheatsheets) and illuminating vignettes (What This Looks Like), this book is a terrific guide for families starting on their caregiving journey. The exhortations to focus on the patients perspective and the gentle reminders that caregiving is often frustratingly difficult make the manual especially valuable.

Muriel R. Gillick, MD
Harvard Medical School, author of The Caregivers Encyclopedia: A Compassionate Guide to Caring for Older Adults

An essential step-by-step guide for families wondering how to respond when an older parent begins to experience difficulties. Full of sound practical advice, compassion, expert wisdom, and helpful resources.

Judith Graham
Navigating Aging columnist, Kaiser Health News

Far too many adult children struggle with uncertainty and doubt when it comes to helping their parents. This book is the missing piece that turns a puzzle into a picture.

Bill Thomas, MD
Founder, Changing Aging and The Eden Alternative

Gives adult children easy-to-understand answers to the many challenging questions they have about their aging parents health, behavior, and safety. Even more important, it raises questions that they may not have even known to ask. And the answers are supported by communication tools and strategies to deal with obstacles they may encounter. Dr. Leslie Kernisan, a geriatrician, and her coauthor, Paula Spencer Scott, have combined their years of experience to offer practical, realistic, and respectful ways to guide both readers new to caregiving and those who are experienced but still searching.

Carol Levine
Senior fellow and former director, Families and Health Care Project, United Hospital Fund, and MacArthur Foundation fellow

An outstanding guide for anyone concerned about an aging parent. The cheatsheets alone are worth ten times the purchase price, helping to ensure the best chance at success. Family caregivers stress about fixing things. This guide will provide a step-by-step process for the journey.

Linda Fodrini-Johnson, MA, MFT, CMC
Geriatric care manager/consultant/educator and past president, Aging Life Care Association

As a health activist for 12 years, Ive learned to watch for deep understanding and pragmatic structured tools. As an aging boomer, I hunger for compassionate guidancefor my whole family. This is a home run on both counts.

Dave DeBronkart
e-Patient Dave blogger and author of Let Patients Help

This book is a resource not just for the sons and daughters of aging parents but anyone who has to help older adults who are beginning to show signs of memory loss. Using a step-by-step process and applying them to two fictional cases, the authors give the readers practical advice on how to investigate and talk to older adults about their concerns and a clear process on how to develop realistic solutions that align with the hopes of both children and parents alike.

Eric Widera, MD
Geriatrics professor, UCSF School of Medicine

I can think of no one, and I mean no one, I would trust more than Dr. Kernisan to deliver a highly practical, understandable, and usable guide for navigating this life phase with your parents. This is a much-needed resource that I recommend for everyone, including adult children and their aging parents.

Anne Tumlinson
Daughterhood.org

Finally, a practical guide for the adult children of aging parents to help them help their parents navigate physical and cognitive decline of old age. An indispensable guide to one of the hardest things that most of us will have to do.

Sei Lee, MD
Geriatrics professor, UCSF School of Medicine

When is a memory lapse, fall, mood, or behavior change a sign of dementia versus a side effect of a medication or even a sign of an infection? How do I bring it up without scaring them or making them angry? And what do their doctors need to know? How to balance safety and independence? This is an invaluable resource to help people navigate what is too often a frightening and confusing process to ensure people get the right care.

Geri Lynn Baumblatt
Family caregiver advocate and cofounder of the Difference Collaborative

Pure gold! Whether youre planning future care for your parents or are stuck for answers about what comes next, this is your resource. Stellar advice from the doctor we all wish our parents could have.

Carol Bradley Bursack
Author of Minding Our Elders

A much-needed book that gives clear, actionable, and medically sound advice to those of us whose parents have started to need help. This book breaks down what is often an emotionally complex and daunting process into manageable steps, providing you with a road map and the tools you need to navigate the process and reassuring you along the way. I know that many will benefit from it.

Roy Remer
Executive director, Zen Caregiving Project

This book is GPS for the children of older adults. If you are caring for an aging parent, this invaluable guide will help keep you on the right road.

Howard Gleckman
Forbes columnist and author of Caring for Our Parents

This book puts practical, useful information from a practicing geriatrician at your fingertips.

Alex Smith, MD
Associate professor, UCSF School of Medicine

A thorough exploration of the conversations, resources, checklists, and helpful hints on how to best care for aging parents. The expert insights on what to know and how to be empathetic about getting older make this an essential book.

Sherri Snelling
Gerontologist, CEO of The Caregiver Club

Dr. Kernisan and Paula Scott show us how to get started when we are worried about our parents, offering clear, pragmatic guidance and ways to handle even the thorniest of issues like dementia or our parents resistance to help. No one is prepared for the journey, but stop worrying, read this book and get started. You are not alone.

Janet Simpson Benvenuti
Founder, Circle of Life Partners and author of Dont Give Up on Me!

Invaluable advice and direct access to practical toolslike having your own geriatrician.

Amy Goyer
Family caregiving consultant and author of AARPs Juggling Work, Life, and Caregiving

When Your
Aging Parent
Needs Help

A geriatricians step-by-step
guide to memory loss, resistance,
safety worries, and more

Leslie Kernisan, MD, MPH
Paula Spencer Scott

A Better Health While Aging Quick Book

Copyright 2021 Leslie Kernisan, MD, and Paula Spencer Scott

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Published in the United States by Better Health While Aging, San Francisco
1st edition

ISBN: 978-1-7361532-0-8 (print)