My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine" –
The Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aged Loved Ones

Dennis McCullough, MD, Harper, 2008

Dr. Dennis McCullough's mother slowly transformed from a healthy, active 85-year-old woman to a delicate and feeble 92-year-old. She was dying in hospice care, not from a specific disease or illness, but rather from the aggressive frailty common among the oldest of old people.

In light of his mother's decline, Dr. McCullough's wrote My Mother, Your Mother - a call to action for relatives of the very old. Doctors and hospitals have fallen into the dangerous habit of treating the very elderly just as they do healthy adults. High tech, flashy diagnostic tests are exhausting for the elderly, and side effects of medications that are life saving at 75 can cause problems at 95. Ultimately, Dr. McCullough argues, treatments that are offered to the very old should be intended not to save lives or to restore youthful vigor, but rather to ease the inevitable and irreversible decline. They should, in fact, be Slow Medicine.

Slow Medicine is based on "the balanced, mutually respectful, and supportive" partnerships between doctors, nurses, and other health professionals - as well as the elder patients, their families, close friends, neighbors, and anyone else chosen to be part of "the Circle of Concern." For children who want to create a Circle of Concern to support their parents, Dr. McCullough offers guidance on the changing players and their roles as elders move through the eight stages into which he divides late life.

My Mother, Your Mother is a wonderful resource for anyone who is struggling to care for an elderly parent.