By Richard E. Ueberfluss, PT and edited by David Brimm — Updated March 27, 2026 Download One-page Room-by-Room Safety Checklist (printable) Introduction As people age, the home environment often becomes the site of the greatest risk for injury. Falls, medication/chemical poisoning, choking (dysphagia), and fire remain the most common and most preventable hazards. Recent advances—telehealth, smart-home devices, guided exercise programs,…
Consumer Affairs reports that up to 80 percent of falls in the home occur inside a bathroom. Even more startling is that one in three people over age 65 fall every year. Hospital emergency rooms are inundated annually with 200,000 Americans who are injured at home due to bathroom-related mishaps. The bathroom can be a slippery, steamy and outright dangerous…
Is your mother okay? Here are 4 tips to make sure you understand her physical and mental condition when you are together: Watch Your Mother. How is she walking? Is she moving slower than the last time you saw her? How does she look? Is she clean and groomed? We don’t mean that she has to be dressed like June…
By Richard Ueberfluss More than 50 percent of women and 25 percent of men over fifty will suffer from an osteoporosis-related fracture. Osteoporosis occurs when bone breaks down faster than it is replenished, leaving the skeleton porous and brittle. Women lose bone density more rapidly during menopause, so they are more susceptible to osteoporosis than men. Multiple medications, poor vision…
New research out of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and reported by CNN, points to falls as being more common among individuals with the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s. Researchers found that silent biological changes in the brain may take place a decade or more before the outward symptoms begin to manifest. An estimated 5.4 million Americans are currently living…
Bed Rest serves as a time honored treatment for both injury and illness, and is prescribed more often around flu season. A normal muscle, at complete rest, in absence of illness, loses up to 15% of its strength each week.1 During bed rest, the first muscles to become atrophied are the trunk and lower extremity muscles involved in gait and…
A story by United Press International (UPI) discovered that traumatic spinal cord injuries are on the rise in the United States and the leading cause no longer is motor vehicle crashes, but falls, researchers say. The story appeared in the Journal of Neurotrauma. UPI’s source was Dr. Shalini Selvarajah, a post-doctoral surgical research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School…
Proper hydration is one of the most essential aspects of maintaining good functionality of the joints and organs in the body. Many of the body’s essential nutrients are delivered through water. Some of our joints, such as the knees have no blood supply and rely solely on nutrients from water to maintain proper function. In the elderly, hydration is especially…
A study of senior women at the Shimane University Faculty of Medicine in Japan found that the average sodium intake among all the women studied was 5,211 milligrams a day. The women in the top 25 percent for sodium intake averaged 7,561 milligrams a day. Now there is evidence that having a very high salt intake is linked to a…
