Innovation in behavior patterns that characterize nurses.

Then why are researchers and doctors striving to cure Alzheimer’s and other typical diseases of old age? Let us return to the good old days and the picturesque habits we have heard about in distant populations: the Eskimo people who left their old people alone on the ice to die; or those tribes in some wild place in the Amazon or Africa who ate their elderly people to absorb their experience and to quench hunger for a day. We are exaggerating, of course, but it is basically true, at least in our experience, that some nurses and doctors are less patient and merciful with old patients than with the young ones. Why? Many of us have old parents at home, with the same problems, and sometimes going to work is a kind of escape from them, but to find there a ‘clone’ of our old ones does not leave us any hiding places. Besides, we will hopefully all become old, but we fear we will get helpless, ugly, dirty and alone like those in hospital beds, without loved ones around us or with them trying to avoid our presence. Old patients are a ‘memento’, a mirror in which we foresee how we may become and fear to be treated.