Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: And I thought it was a really beautiful and powerful way to talk about the benefits of an aging population. So often we hear about costs and challenges, but I think that this is a great way to show and capture all of the wonderful things that come with it as well.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Age of Aging, a podcast about living well with an aging brain, produced by the Penn Memory Center. I'm Jake Johnson.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: And I'm Terence Casey.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: We finally did it. We made it to the end of season two. How are you feeling?
[00:00:43] Speaker C: It feels good. I feel this was a more complex, deeper season than we had in season one. And I think we've heard some really great stories over the past few months. How do you feel about it?
[00:00:57] Speaker B: I'm feeling really good about it. I think season one was a real test of just, can we get the podcast out? Can it sound compelling? Will people want to listen to it? And then season two was really about honing that down, trying to make sure that the storytelling was there, that the production was there, and I think we really executed on that. I feel really proud of the episodes that we made, and we have a really great foundation at the end of season two.
[00:01:26] Speaker C: In season three and beyond, there's a real opportunity for us to bring in more voices. We've talked a lot about how there's a really strong team helping us produce this podcast, but we'll look to bring in additional partners on the editorial side that will broaden our focus on the age of aging, take this really beyond our specific areas of expertise and really get into what it means to age well in 2025 and beyond.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: That's something we're really thinking about for the coming episodes, is trying to expand the topic of aging and cover a lot of different ideas within that. And as we were thinking about this last episode of the season, we wanted to have an episode that was semi reflective on the season, that was, but also allow for broader discussion than we've had in the past and not focused on a single topic. So for this episode, we brought in a lot of voices from past episodes. There's a few new ones in there as well to share some broad ideas about the world that they're thinking about, that they would like to implement.
[00:02:40] Speaker C: We called it Ideas We Should Steal, but that's not a hundred percent what we were asking everyone for. We wanted people to dream big about how aging in America can change, and that's a pretty tall order. We invite people to consider ideas that they could steal from other countries, but we also asked them to consider ideas that are actively being implemented here at Penn Medicine already, or to dream big and think of something that is not yet in place anywhere. So there's not a lot of thievery going on here and ideas we should steal, but hopefully we are going to hear some pretty unique ideas. And I will say, Jake, you've conducted all of these interviews. I haven't actually heard any of these yet. So this is my first time, which is a real treat, and I'm looking forward to seeing what people had come up with.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: As you said, the focus isn't on the stealing aspect. It's more about allowing people to think idealistically about the world, what they would want to see change, what they feel passionate about. I think we just wanted to give people a space to, like, talk about something that they daydream about or that they would love to see in the world without any kind of consequences. So the format for this one's going to be a little different. We're going to listen to a collection of them, about two to three ideas, and then we'll talk about them. And we won't be able to get to all of the ideas, but we will talk about most of them. So, yeah, this should be a fun one. All right. All right, see you on the other side.
[00:04:17] Speaker D: My name is Melissa Kelly. I'm a clinical research project manager working mainly on our clinical trials here at the Penn Memory Center. And an idea I think we should steal is integrating older adult care centers with childcare centers. Because I've seen it done in other places, most recently an article that came.
[00:04:42] Speaker E: Out of Great Britain where they've done it.
[00:04:44] Speaker D: And it seems like a really beautiful unification of older adults with children and giving them opportunities to read to one another, both the children to the adults with impairments and vice versa. And it seemed like a really beautiful way to kind of cross generations and encourage tolerance and learning from one another.
[00:05:09] Speaker F: My name is Anne Basting. I'm the founder of Time Slips and emeritus professor at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. My idea is basically the full integration of arts and healthcare. And as evidenced, I think, in my work through the growing of memory cafes, where every arts and culture organization, including libraries, museums, really any place, any third space where people gather can be a place where people can gather who have dementia, and they're caregivers, people with dementia, live in the community like you and me, and they simply need a place that is accessible, that they can get to, that they can get in and out of the door, just like everybody else should be able to. The only thing I would think is that it has moments during the day when it's quiet enough to hear each other and that it has a bathroom nearby. But that's any kind of meeting space, right? That's not particular to people with dementia. I think the magic wand you need to make that actually happen is a little bit of the magic dissolution of ageism and ableism, because there's a real perception that people don't want to see or hear or know about people with dementia. So we have to break down that barrier a little bit just to normalize the experience that they're our neighbors, they're our parents, they're our family members. People trying to live at home with dementia should have gathering systems that support them for programming and friendship and life enrichment and continued brain health.
[00:06:59] Speaker C: I was thrilled to hear Ann Basting, who has been a close collaborator of the Penn Memory center for years now, name drop the key word there of third spaces. I'm personally obsessed with the idea of third spaces in the community. I keep a standing calendar event for my family to visit our library, and every time I go, I'm indoctrinating my friends with kids, trying to tell them how wonderful third spaces are and libraries in particular. And I couldn't agree more that it really would be so easy to make some of these changes, and we just need the willpower to move it forward. It was particularly moved by her comment that persons living with dementia are not things to fear. They're our neighbors, and they have as much of a right to our community as anyone else. I would love to see this happen. And now I'm particularly motivated to see how we can work on making sure that the third spaces of my township really could look forward.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I really liked both of these together because they talked a lot about the socialization of older adults and destigmatizing older adults as well. To your point about third spaces, I remember right after college I worked at a cafe, which was a few blocks away from where I lived. And that was one of the first times I honestly was involved in a third space daily. And wasn't my third space because it was the place that I worked. But you see all of these different people come together. Retired people would come in daily and get their oat latte. A lot of houseless people would come in and get coffee or just, like, sit. So there was a lot of different groups of people interacting that all were in the neighborhood. And that is really such a special experience. And to Dr. Basting's point about the stigma around people with dementia, it's Interesting, because I think that these places are also a way in which you start to get rid of that stigma, is by actually being in a space where you're with your neighbors and your neighbor might have a condition like dementia, and you get used to it and you understand it as something that's a part of people's lives. So obviously that makes it sound easier than it is. And I think that it will be difficult to break down people's preconceived ideas about that or uncomfortableness. But I do think that might be something that continually improves the more that you build in these spaces and prioritize them.
[00:09:43] Speaker C: Yeah. I say this as someone who absolutely loves the Penn Memory Center's monthly Memory Cafes, where we create a safe social space for older adults, regardless of cognitive impairment. I would love for our Memory Cafes to go away because we have a community that fills that need and that we have coffee shops that are safe social spaces for our patients and their caregivers. Melissa's proposal reminded me of another program that we had at the Penn Memory center years ago called Building Bridges. And this was a partnership with Children's Hospital Philadelphia, which is just across the street from our office space and our clinic here. And this was an opportunity for some of our patients or research participants to actually go out to Children's Hospital and read or otherwise engage with some of the patients there. Obviously, this is a much smaller version of what Melissa was proposing, but we saw that model worked. And personally, I love that program. I would love to see more things like that in the future. And I think Melissa has a great proposal here.
[00:11:01] Speaker G: Hi, I'm Anthony Roth Costanzo, and I'm the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia. And I'm also an opera singer. So an idea I've always wanted to steal is taking a page from the book of Ballet Russe, which was Diaghilev and Balanchine's company in Paris in the twenties, was a coming together of all different kinds of artists and what they created. They weren't exactly ballets, they weren't exactly operas, they weren't exactly concerts. They lived in this liminal space where art could be art. And collaboration was key. And they had different people from Jean Cocteau to Gertrude Stein. They would commission Stravinsky and sets would be by Picasso. And they had all these different artists in Paris in the twenties involved in creating really cutting edge shows. And I love that for opera because opera is inherently about this cross disciplinary collaboration. It's always been a place where drama and music come together with fashion and the costume designs and art and the set design. And because the fine art world was coming together with what we now call the nonprofit arts and things like that, there were all different models working in sync. You know, you had a commercial model working with a nonprofit model. And I just love the way that engaged audiences. It outraged them sometimes, but it brought new ideas to the fore. And I think giving us a different context and different points of access for music and how it can impact us is really important. And it's one of my missions.
[00:12:32] Speaker H: I'm Jason Karlwish. I'm a physician and writer, and I'm the co director of the Penn Memory center at the University of Pennsylvania. So my idea that I would like to steal is. I don't know where one could steal it from, because I don't know anywhere that does this. But what I would like to see is that classes in ballet training become part of the ordinary athletic education for young men and women. Perhaps this is maybe in a fantasy, the case in Russia where the Vaganova School of Ballet was created and fostered. So steal from somewhere where ballet training is normative, not considered overly gendered, and all the other foolish activities.
[00:13:11] Speaker D: Um.
[00:13:11] Speaker H: Cause it's probably one of the ultimate sports that should be as much part of athletic training as sports such as baseball, soccer, swimming, et cetera. And I did call it athletic training in sports, even though it's not a sport. But I think as an athletic endeavor, it is absolutely spectacular for strength, balance, flexibility, and really connecting brain and body. It is probably one of the best ways to finally understand what mind is, because it is your brain working with your body to create an emergent phenomena because it's very cognitively demanding. The position, learning, a combination, a series of steps that add up into a performance is incredibly cognitively demanding, the amount of learning and memorization that's going on there. And so it is a good example of brain and body working together to create an experience, otherwise known as to create mind.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Emily Largent. I am an associate professor of medical ethics at Penn and I am part of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center's outreach, Recruit and engagement core. An idea I think we should steal actually comes from one of my hobbies. I really love photography. I think that it's a very powerful way to document what's happening in the world and share these images and ideas with other people. And earlier this year, I learned about a photography project where photographers were going around the world and identifying 72 year olds. They picked that age because that's the median lifespan worldwide. And they documented the daily lives of those older adults to show all of the experiences they had, the wisdom they brought, their hobbies, their families, how they contributed to their communities. They have pictures of people from all different continents and very different kinds of lifestyles. So some of them are talking about traditional handcrafts, Some of them are talking about the Pilates classes, Some of them are talking about how they help care for their grandchildren. And it's a really neat breadth of experiences. And because I do love photography as a medium, it's really fun to see the different images and how people dress and where they live and the sorts of foods they're eating. It documents a lot of cultural context as well, to show what it means to be an older adult in different places. And I thought it was a really beautiful and powerful way to talk about the benefits of an aging population. So often we hear about costs and challenges, but I think that this is a great way to show and capture all of the wonderful things that come with it as well.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: I just have to say, I am so thrilled with the diversity of responses here. We intentionally left this topic pretty broad. We didn't want to plant too many seeds in people's heads. We wanted to see if we could, by being vague, come up with kind of a wide range of ideas and why. I think we nailed that.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: I was not expecting when I got on the call with Dr. Karlwish for him to start talking about ballet training for physical education, but it was great. It was really fun to hear an expert in aging and care talk about one of his personal hobbies. He said that he's been taking ballet classes now for a while, and I'd never really thought about ballet as a physical activity, But I thought it was really interesting to hear him talk about how it was this combination of the body and the brain to create mind in the performance of the different steps and routines and the movements that require a lot of physical effort. So I just thought that that one was really cool.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: I agree. I think the whole time he was speaking, I was thinking that what he's talking about is ballet having its own yoga movement from 10, 15 years ago. I remember as a kid, that was sort of when players in the Philadelphia Eagles, who I respected as these giants of athletic prowess, when I learned that, in fact, they were learning how to do the downward dog pose. And, you know, high school football coaches are telling kids that yoga is not for hippies. It's actually great for mobility and training, strength training and control. And I see that with what Dr. Karlowicz is proposing with ballet. I don't know that ballet is in its yoga moment from 2005 or whatever, but you could imagine it transitioning. I was also thinking about our healthy brain aging talks. Our team will frequently go out into the community, and people always want to know, what can I do to maintain my brain health as I age? And our closing line is, normally, one of the best things you can do to maintain your brain health is try to learn a new language. And now I'm thinking maybe at our presentations, we should start giving out contact information for some local ballet studios.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: I also really liked Dr. Largen's idea because it's something we talked about in the Arts and the Mind episode, the way that art can communicate ideas about aging and what it means to age. I thought, particularly when she was talking about the photography project as a kind of positive image of an aging population. And it's something that we talk about in the show a lot, too, of, oh, the. The many issues that are going to arise because we have a aging population that is growing so rapidly. And. And that's super valid to talk about, but it is also inherently negative. So I think that was really cool to look at a project that is really promoting the way that older people live around the world and the positive ways that they impact their community, because it's not going to be completely negative that people are living longer. I mean, there's something really great about that. It's a sign of progress in our society around aging that we're going to have to figure out how to care for a growing older population.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: I thought a lot during Dr. Largen's idea that we should feel about a project that we had almost a decade ago that we called the typical day project. And this was actually a graduate level photo elicitation study by our outreach coordinator at the time. And she gave participants in her study cameras and asked them to document their typical day, including the struggles that they had living with mild cognitive impairment. I should have mentioned that these were all adults living with mild cognitive impairment. So looking at both the burdens and the AIDS that they had in their life, and this was meant to help learn about a typical day of living with mild cognitive impairment. But it really became this kind of beautiful representation of this cross section of a diverse group of older adults. And that was limited to people in the Philadelphia region who were already connected to the Penn Memory center in some way. So it was a pretty small sample size. But even with that small sample size, we had some people showing their Medicine boxes and their calendars and their bedside tables. And so with this global perspective, I think you're right. It really gets to destigmatizing what it means to be an older adult.
[00:20:34] Speaker I: Hi, my name is Kate Leets. I'm the social worker in Penn's outpatient neurology clinic. And an idea I think we should steal is the idea of living in small, walkable communities. I'm thinking of a community where the citizens of the area can walk to the major things they need. I'm thinking, you know, food, access to their support systems, whether it's friends or family, having them close by and within what we would consider maybe a walking distance of a couple miles. And I think the benefits are the opportunity to move physically, to be close by to people who are supportive, and also to have that element of socialization and engagement in the day to day I think is really important. And I wish there was more of it. Hi, my name is Lanie. I'm a genetic counselor in the Department of Neurology at Penn. And an idea I think we should steal is to create virtual tools to increase access to genetic education to all people who need it. So as a genetic counselor, I ideally would love every neurology department to have a genetic counselor embedded within the department so that any patient presenting to care for a neurologic condition or with family history of a neurologic condition could get access to genetics education and counseling if they wanted or needed it. But unfortunately, a lot of neurology departments don't have a genetic counselor on staff right now because they don't have the funding structure to hire one or they can't locate one to have on their team. A few years ago, I was watching 60 Minutes and there was a segment about how people who worked in advocacy around the Holocaust wanted to ensure that even after Holocaust survivors were no longer around, we had the ability to learn from them. And so they developed this really cool tool where they sat down and did hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews with survivors of the Holocaust, asking them any question they could think of, and made this archive of responses to these questions, and created this hologram tool where now anybody can sit down in front of this hologram of a person who survived the Holocaust and interview them. They can ask them questions, and using some form of AI tool, they now can extract a response that's most appropriate to whatever question is asked. And so I was sitting there thinking, how cool would it be if you could do these same hundreds of hours of interviews with a genetic counselor or other healthcare providers and create, like, a digital tool where somebody can ask questions and get responses to their medical questions in terms of just, like, medical information, not personalized medical care. We don't want to replace a genetic counseling visit. The point isn't that this virtual tool would be in lieu of meeting with a real provider, but it is sort of a nice way to get those frequently asked questions addressed, which can then either shorten that educational component of an actual medical interaction, allow people to focus on counseling and connecting as humans and addressing their personalized needs. And it's a lot more engaging, I would think, than reading a printout or clicking through a website.
[00:23:47] Speaker F: My name is Lynn Kronemias, and I'm involved in the Aging Brain Cohort clinical trial at Penn. And the idea that I think that we should steal is hydrotherapy. It's called Kneip's Therapy. It was enacted by a Sebastian Kniep in the 1800s. And so his approach was using five pillars of hydrotherapy. And one of them I actually got to participate in when I was in Germany, I was doing a genealogy tour with my cousin in Germany, and we visited the Kimsae Lake. And so we spent the day walking around the market. And as we're leaving, I noticed these kind of troughs with water in them, and they had handrails and everything. And I noticed people taking their shoes off and walking in them. And my legs were. And feet were very tired from walking around. So I took my shoes off, I pulled my skirt up, and I'm walking through these channels. They're about maybe 20ft long. And then there's places that you can sit down and chat with people. It was very cold. Like, when you first step in, you think, ooh, I don't think I can do this. But as I walked around and I got out, I couldn't believe how much better my legs felt and my feet. And they have several of these places all over Germany that were put there by knife. And it's supposed to stimulate your circulation and promote blood flow. And what it does is the cold causes the superficial blood vessels to contract, and then together with the muscle movements, it's said to promote venous flow. And then this helps you feel better. So it's one of those things I think we could use in parks in our country.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: When I moved to my neighborhood a decade ago, we were excited because the elementary schools across the street and we could get to the grocery store, it was less than a mile away from our front door. And those things were nice for us. But as people get older. These things are lifesavers. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, they can be real dangers to quality of life. We talked about this a little bit in our Building Trust episode that touched on social and structural determinants of health. But a bad sidewalk is an inconvenience for you and for me, but it's a fall hazard for older adults. It could discourage them from getting exercise, getting out of the house more, it could lower their socialization, and it could reduce the quality of food that they're getting because they're not able to go to a grocery store that is in that direction and will opt for the corner store or the fast food that's in the opposite. So it's. It's not just about having pretty sidewalks. A walkable community can really improve quality of life at all levels. So, yes, that's 100% an idea we should steal. But how about hydrotherapy? What did you. What did you think of that one?
[00:26:51] Speaker B: I love that one. I had never heard of that before, but I love the idea of just public installations like that that are just purely for people's wellbeing. And I also love that it was kind of a third space as we were talking about, as she mentioned, where she sat down and was talking with strangers and other people in the park, other tourists. So the hydrotherapy is one aspect of it that's a great service. But I think in general, the idea of having more public spaces, public parks that have a wide variety of services, gathering places, is really important.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: Yeah. I have to admit when. When I first heard the phrase hydrotherapy, I was picturing the. The cold plunges in the ice baths. And you see every influencer on Instagram and YouTube is suddenly telling people that this is the trick to aging well is to smash up all the ice in a big tub and then hop in. And I'll admit I tried that precisely once for about 11 seconds, and it's not for me. But what Lynn Kronemi was describing here, that sounds much more up my alley. I think you're right. The. The idea of it as a third space and for socialization, just. I think it's access to community, all of these elements. Her experience of walking barefoot through the channels, that might be sort of the long game here. But truthfully, there are a lot of incremental steps in between. I will often go swim at our local YMCA in the morning before work, and usually when I'm there, there's an aquatic fitness class going on on the other side. And so some. Some of these things do exist. It's not. It's not walking barefoot through channels in Germany, but there is certainly some element of this hydrotherapy present. And I would strongly encourage people to want to embrace what's already there and ask for more from your existing third spaces.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: And I think Lynn really hit the nail on the head with this prompt as well, because the idea of traveling to a different place and just seeing how people live differently and the different resources that are available to them, the different way that different cultures and societies approach things, that was really one of the key inspirations for this prompt. So I really liked that she used her genealogy trip to Germany as the basis for this one.
[00:29:25] Speaker E: Hi, my name is Lauren Massimo and I'm an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Nursing and I also co direct the University of Pennsylvania Frontotemporal Degeneration center, which is in the School of Medicine. An idea we should steal, I think a lot about stronger social policies that are currently in place in other countries that I would love to see here in the United States in particular for people who are older. So as we get older, we sometimes need some help with our daily activities, especially people with cognitive disorders that I primarily see in practice and focus my research on need help with their daily activities, things like dressing and bathing and eating. And those people deserve to make choices about where they want to be, where they want to live, and they deserve to remain independent for as long as they possibly can with good support. And I think that currently the system in the United States is not set up to prioritize that. So, for example, places like Australia, right, they provide support for in home care for daily activities, things like shopping, transportation and personal care. And they provide support for caregivers as well, which I think is really important, not just to focus on the person who has needs, but also to support the caregiver who is supporting the person with needs. So, for example, there are respite programs that are available that give caregivers a very much needed break so that they can be refreshed to continue to provide caregiving. I think that what we see here in the United States is that, for example, older adults and their families often have to come out of pocket to have home health aides come into the home or companions, right? And that can be very, very costly. But in other countries, again, these are built into the healthcare system in a way that everyone is eligible for those kinds of services, regardless of what their income level is. And so I think I would love to see those more comprehensive types of programs that are offered in other places to be here in the United States, regardless of income.
[00:31:47] Speaker D: My name is Meg Kolapski. I am the associate director of Social programs at the Penn Memory Center. And an idea I would steal is having insurance or other kind of payers in the medical care space provide comprehensive and community based dementia care for older adults experiencing memory changes and their family caregivers. What I would envision this look like is many of our older adults and family members right now are getting their care from a lot of different providers. And coordinating all of this as well as making sure there's equitable access is a real challenge in this space. And so saying that caregivers are already doing so much in terms of providing care for the loved one, having these kind of in more of a hub fashion where they can go to one place and kind of get all these different elements or referrals, or having this kind of more comprehensive for them, I think would make a big impact in terms of just how accessible this care feels. And there's a lot of support that needs to happen before, you know, someone ends up in potentially an institutional setting or bringing in significant amounts of medical care to their homes. And so having something that's more comprehensive, having something that is supported by insurance, that both makes meaningful impacts for the older adults quality of life as well as the family caregivers quality of life, I think would be a really impactful change we could make in the dementia care space. Hi, my name is Shaina Stites. I'm a clinical psychologist and researcher in the Penn Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. I study the social and psychological experiences of early Alzheimer's disease. And an idea I think we should steal is positive deviance. Positive deviance is this idea from the 1960s that older adults might actually be familiar with, which is a community based idea of learning where instead of following the norms or what most people do most of the time in order to improve our lives, we look to those individuals who may not be the most common in our communities, but are doing the best off. I came to know positive deviance from research that was conducted in Vietnam during the 1990s, where in fishing villages there were a lot of children and families that were starving and malnourished. And amongst these communities where most people were starving and not doing well, there were some people that were doing quite well. And so researchers were trying to figure out how what most people weren't doing well, how some people were still actually doing well, even thriving in these tough times. And they found that they were families that had adapted to the conditions. So they were agrarian farmers going through a drought instead of trying to continue to raise crop. These were people that switched their diets to eat fish. And so the kids were doing great, the families were doing great. But in their community, they were actually the outliers, the what you'd call positive deviance. They were deviants for not following the norms and the traditions in the community, but positive because they were managing to still do really well. When there's a need to adapt, when something unexpected happens and you have to pivot, it's actually those people who are the outliers, the ones who aren't doing what's typically done, that manage usually to come out above. And so that's a lesson we can learn in our own lives, is not only going with the mainstream, but actually look to see who's doing the best and how we can learn from them and raise ourselves up or help others raise up. One reason it came to mind is because as we age, I know for myself here, our bodies are changing, our lives are changing, and our ability not to just always try to do what we've always done, what's been the norm for us, but rather to look around and see, like, how do I have to be now, right? What do I have to adjust? Who's doing well? What are they using to do well? And how can I be like them, right? These positive deviants who are standing out and thriving. I think it also works really well for caregivers. When we're caring for a person with dementia, there are some things we come to expect from that person, but that person, in part because of just being human, but also in part because of their condition, they're also changing. So our ability to not get stuck in a rut and maybe look for ways that we can adapt how we care for a person can be forms of positive deviance. There's also caregiver groups where we're around other people who are caring for people and being able to learn from them. And the tips and tricks they may pick up are ways in which we can act as positive deviants in our own worlds.
[00:36:26] Speaker C: This collection of ideas is really different than the other ones that we heard. I think they're more sort of clinical in nature and more policy focused. And for the same reasons, that makes them more dense. It also makes them more important because changes in policy and clinical practice and insurance reimbursements, that's where the things that the ideas that dreamers come up with are implemented into practice. And I was laughing a little bit as Meg Kalowski was explaining that this integrated coordinated care and reimbursement for caregivers and things like that, because it addresses the need that Dr. Massimo was explaining it in her pitch. And ultimately, if any of these ideas that we've talked about, particularly with the third spaces and urban planning and walkability, I mean, all of this really comes down to policy implementation and change there. So we desperately need the Laura Massimos and the Meg Kalovskys of the world to continue pushing to have these integrated. And some of those changes are taking place here at Penn Medicine. We'll be looking in July at how we can manage some of that coordinated care. We're not really ready to break that down in detail yet, but hopefully we'll have some more information early in 2025 and then hopefully we will be able to realize some of Dr. Massimo's and Mankalovsky's goals here.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: It stood out to me working at the Memory center now for a year, really just how spread out these different services are and all of the out of pocket costs that Dr. Massimo talked about. So I think both of them kind of touch on this sense of integration and necessity for providing this kind of care for an older population, which, as we said before, is going to keep rapidly growing. I thought that Dr. Steitz idea was a great place to end because it is the broad concept kind of about our ways of adapting to change and to time. I think that applies individually as she was talking about how as caregivers, we have to think about new ways to take care of people. If we're somebody with dementia, we have to think about new ways of living and how the people that are doing the best are doing the best and implementing that in our own life. But I think this whole exercise is kind of a practice of positive deviance in a way of looking at different ideas from around the world that are not universal yet, that are not broadly being utilized and implementing them and looking at them for their results. So I thought that that was a super interesting concept I'd never heard of, but I thought really applied very well here.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: All day long we're surrounded by researchers who are talking about data. And it's important for us to remind ourselves and each other that when we talk about data, we're talking about human beings and we're talking about somebody's partner or mother or father and the work that is being done in terms of trying to discover new treatments for diseases that cause cognitive impairment or policy changes that impact professional or familial caregivers all of these impact individuals on a deeply personal level. And it's very helpful to change our approach from here's what we see in terms of data trends to who are the outliers and why are they, as Dr. Seitz said, thriving in tough times. When we talk about aging, particularly aging in America, there's a lot of conversations about tough times. And so seeking out those who thrive will really be key. And I, I think what we will find is that the, the positive deviance will be in a lot of the other ideas that we heard here today, that people who have access to walkable communities and intergenerational living and heck, maybe even hydrotherapy.
And so I agree. I thought that was a nice way to end it. And rather than that being sort of the end, all of our ideas we should steal. It's really step one.
[00:41:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:10] Speaker C: Well, I think that wraps it up for season two. How are you planning on spending the break before Age of Aging returns?
[00:41:18] Speaker B: That's a good question. I think I will obviously take a little break, but already we're looking at different ideas for next season, kind of mapping it out, the people we want to talk to, the changes we want to make. So I'm going to be thinking a lot about that over the next month or so. And we'll be back soon, don't worry. And there might even be a surprise episode in between. So stay tuned for that.
[00:41:47] Speaker C: And for those who aren't already receiving it, we'll include in the show notes a way to subscribe to our new news magazine for the Age of Aging. This is an email that will come out from the Penn Memory center every other Thursday, alternating with our existing Insight. Insight News magazine and the Age of Aging News magazine will really focus on promoting the recent episodes of the podcast, but we'll also include some additional insights from the production team, some of our colleagues across the Penn Memory center and the FTD center and the Institute on Aging. And then when we're between seasons, between episodes, we'll have a little bit more behind the scenes about the podcast, and we will also have some prompts for how our listeners can get more involved in the podcast, but I don't think we want to give too much away in the meantime.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: All right, thanks so much, Terrence.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Age of Aging. The Age of Aging podcast is supported by the Penn Memory center, the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer's Disease Research center, the Institute on Aging, and the Penn FTD Center. Special thanks to our contributors. This episode, Melissa Kelly, Dr. Ann Basting, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Dr. Jason Carlowish, Dr. Emily Largen, Kate Leeds, Lainey Dratch, Lynne Cronomize, Dr. Lauren Massimo, Meg Kalofsky and Dr. Shane Stites.
[00:43:18] Speaker C: Contributors include myself and Jake Johnson, as well as Nicolette Calcovecchia, Dalia El Said, Marie Njigneri, Jason Karlowish, Emily Largent, Meg McCarthy and Megan Sharp.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: More information on the stories you heard today can be found in our Show Notes and on our website, pennmemorycenter.or.
