Aging
Essays

Elderly Lenny Savage has began showing signs of dementia, and shortly after he takes to smearing his feces on the walls of his Arizona home, his ailing long-term girlfriend suddenly dies. His adult children Wendy and Jon have little choice but to fly to Arizona and see what can be done for Lenny, but their long-simmering animosity makes it hard for them to deal with the realities of Lenny's condition. The film looks at their struggles with growing up, mortality, and coming to grips with life.

Ram Dass' Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

The paper looks at the concept of culturally competent care that nurses should be giving to their patients in whatever caliber they are in. Specifically of great interest here is the issue of old people and the culturally insensitive general care that they receive in the old age homes due to the cultural incompetence of the nurses and care givers.

The United States of America is currently the largest economy of the globe, with a $15.08 trillion gross domestic product. Despite its major attainments, the American economy is faced with tremendous challenges, such as the still ongoing effects of the economic recession, the aging of the population, the high growth rate in the costs of pension payment and health care or a highly unbalanced national budget. Currently, the United States has one of the largest public debts in the world, representing 67 per cent of its GDP (Central Intelligence Agency, 2013).

The concept of aging has many intrinsic and extrinsic factors that act as markers on an individual organism. Ignoring mortality associated with external environmental factors, very few organisms can be said to have cellular immortality with no decrease in cellular function or repeat division in normal diploid cells. Cellular senescence is a normal process that halts cellular division after a set of cycles of replication. Senescent cells can remain completely functional but lose the programmed process of replication. The normal pathway for senescent cells is either aging with metabolic pathways continuing for the cell or programmed cell death which is known as apoptosis that occurs when cellular function changes, a specific lifetime is reached for the cell or the cell is damaged. The multicellular cnidarians known as a Hydra has been shown to have a complete lack of senescence in cellular function with cells dividing frequently and continuously and being sloughed off at the tips of appendages and new stem cells continuously repopulating (Watanabe 2009). The hydra organism effectively shows no aging (Martinez 1998) and studies of the Hydra genome show that the organism has a mutation in the expression of the p53 gene that manifests as a lack of p53 protein in hydra cells (Rutkowski 2010). The link between a lack of p53 expression and aging has been studied exhaustively with the inverse relationship between tumor suppression and cell immortality at balance with the expression of the protein. What has not been studied under such significant scrutiny has been the relationship between p53 expression and cellular senescence which is the halting of cellular processes to form a dormant cell. The tradeoff for having no pathway to halt cellular activity is continuous cell division and replenishment which the hydra has exploited to live an immortal life. For a more complex animal with differentiated organ systems the nature of p53 tumor suppression and "immortality" is a legitimate tradeoff between insuring that cancer cells become dormant and undergo apoptosis (programmed cell death) and renewing the organ systems of the body.

Poetry Explication – Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas) Introduction The "Poetry Explications" handout from UNC states that a poetry explication is a "relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationship of the words, images, and other small units that make up a poem." Thesis: The speaker in "Fern Hill" dramatically embraces memories from his childhood days at his uncle's farm, when the world was innocent; the second part brings out the speaker's loss of innocence and transition into manhood. This explication will identify and critique Thomas' tone, imagery (including metaphors) and expressive language (as it contributes to the power of the poem). ("Fern Hill" uses 6 verse paragraphs; there are 9 lines in each paragraph.)

Developmental and Cultural Comprehensive Healthcare Analysis

Forced Early Retirement & Employment -- the Catch

The increase in racial and ethnic diversity in the United States and specifically in Anchorage Alaska and the compelling evidence of ethnic health disparities (Smedley, Stith and Nelson, 2002) makes the incorporation of ethnogeriatric perspective into the practice of geriatric health care of critical importance. Reported are the "federally designated racial and ethnic groups…[of]…"American Indian/Alaska Native, African American/Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino American, and white/Caucasian American…" (McBride, 2012, p.1) Also reported are "vast differences or heterogeneity…found between and within these categories related to health beliefs and practices, access and utilization of health care, health risks, family dynamics and caregiving, decision making process and priorities, and response to interventions and changes in health care policies." (McBride & Lewis, 2004; McBride, Morioka-Douglas, & Yeo, 1996; McCabe & Cuellar, 1994; Richardson, 1996; Villa, Cuellar, & Yeo, 1993; Yeo, McCabe, Talamantes, Henderson, Scott, & Yee, 1996 in: McBride, 2012, p.1) Additionally reported is that the heterogeneity within each of the categories of ethnic/racial minority older persons such as sociodemographic characteristics, modes of social interaction and communication, health and healing belief systems, learning behaviors, and certain values and traditions…" all of which "contribute degrees of complexity to the delivery of culturally sensitive health care." (Yeo, McCabe, Henderson, Talamantes, Scott & Yee, 1996 in: McBride, 2012, p.1) The study reported in this work is a qualitative phenomenological research study that examines the experiences of personal care assistants in Anchorage, Alaska.

This essay is in the argument form in which the purpose is to prove that there is an economic depression throughout the globe. The essay begins by making this point and then describes key statistics and information that supports the claims. Distinctions are made between a recession and depression and the importance of this distinction as well.