Take Care Of Mom!

Click here for a printable invitation
for your Mom.

Take Care of Your Mom!

All sons and daughters want their moms to have good medical care.

Your mom should have GYN checkups, heart checks, skin checks, eye checks, and bone density checks. Bones provide the structural support for your body. Old bones snap and break and collapse under pressure easier than new young bones. They heal more slowly than young bones.

We have peak bone thickness and strength when we hit thirty. Until that time, your bones are growing, and more bone is being laid down to strengthen the internal framework of the bone. Think about a dense biscotti, versus a toasted biscuit or English muffin. Its a lot harder to snap a biscotti!

Calcium from food and from supplements makes up the main component of your bones. We need to strengthen the bones during our growing years, because bones gets constantly weaker after age 30. There is a slow decline in strength and integrity of your bones, in the spine, hops, arms and legs. So a 40-yr. old in the same rollerblading accident is more likely to break a bone than a 30-yr. old, given the same impact.

This bone loss accelerates around menopause, as estrogen hormone declines, leading to significant further bone loss. Thin ladies have weaker, more fragile bones. Lack of weight-bearing exercise compounds the problem. It is easy to understand how bones can become fragile.

Why does this matter in real life?

Imagine the bones of the spine as a stack of square bones (vertebral bodies) that separate our heads from our pelvises. Imagine that they get thinner and weaker, less calcium stuff inside. Somebody coughs, sneezes, trips, and suddenly one of those square vertebral bones collapses in the front part of the bone. Ouch. That causes acute back pain, and now the other bones in the stack are lopsided.

Now you have a stack of bones that has some angular pressure on it and guess what -- it makes it more likely that a second vertebral body will get crunched and collapsed. And then a third, etc.

Most people notice that their parents get shorter as they age. Understand now? Ever see a person so bent over that they are walking looking down? an awful and unrecoverable situation. End stage osteoporosis. Its easier for them to keep their pills on the floor than on the tabletop.

Realize also, that as a women his menopause, there is a tendency for a 5-10 pound weight gain as the metabolism slows. Combine that with less room between the top of the head and the pelvis and that gives you a belly bulge. No matter how fit you try to be. Not good. The same thing happens in men starting around Age 60. men get osteoporosis and loose vertebral height, and get belly bulges, so this pertains to dads also!!

Now imagine the 75-yr. old mom. Fragile hip bones from osteoporosis. We all trip on cracks in the street or sidewalk. We slip on wet surfaces, we trip on rugs, or mats that slide, or on dogs, or things left on the floor. Better if we have good muscle strength to recover our balance, better eyesight to see he cracks, better arm strength to brace our falls, better coordination and balance.

But if our 75-yr. old mom falls, and his hard, without bracing, she can break lots of things -- arms, wrists, legs. But the worst is a broken hip or pelvis requiring surgery, bed rest, and causing complications like pneumonia, depression, and long recovery periods. Imagine the strain on you, your dad, your sibs, if mom is recovering for 12 weeks. And its hard for 75-yr. olds to recover back to their strong energetic selves after that. Ever.

So what can we do to stay young and tall and erect and fracture proof?

Lets build an maintain strong bones with calcium, vitamin D and weight-bearing exercise.
Lets work on good posture so that the vertebral bodies are supporting one another.
Lets maintain strong muscles and balance.
Lets minimize tripping and falling risk by maintaining good lighting and flooring and shoe selections.
Lets avoid things like excess alcohol and coffee and other things that damage bones and balance.
And lets monitor the bone density and strength by periodically checking to see how the spine bones and hip bones are doing!

We can use hormones and medicines to make bones stronger. And there is a lot of research going on in women and men to help understand this problem which eventually affects nearly all of us. And lets work on posture, and balance, and muscle strength and diet.

So if you want your mom to stay young and healthy, as long as is physically possible -- make sure she monitors her bones. her doc should be on top of this. medicare and insurance plans pay for bone monitoring every two years, and if the bones are bad, every year!

And if you want our office to help, bring your mom (or your fragile friends, relatives or neighbors) to the office and we can do the monitoring even if they are not our patients. And we will get the report to your mom’s doc, or to them, or to you, along with an appropriate medical note. And the insurance or medicare will pay. And you might get her to do something she's been meaning to do. Or not. Even if she lives in Arizona, or Indiana, or Brooklyn.

And she will get to see who your doctor is, and maybe you will even take her to lunch.

Call Simona Badescu’s “Bone Density Information Line” and get specific details, including insurance and scheduling information. Realize that the bone density takes 15 minutes and doesn’t require the removal of clothes! And leave a number where Simona can call you or your mom back to schedule a personalized bone density exam here in this very office.