This easy stretch can help relieve tension in your neck. Try to stretch after strength training and during any activity that makes you feel stiff, such as sitting at a desk.

You can do this stretch while standing or sitting in a sturdy chair.

Keep your feet flat on the floor, shoulder-width apart.

Slowly turn your head to the right until you feel a slight stretch. Be careful not to tip or tilt your head forward or backward, but hold it in a comfortable position.

Hold the position for 10-30 seconds.

Turn your head to the left and hold the position for 10-30 seconds.

Repeat at least 3-5 times.

Irene Ruth Olson

Irene was born on 6/12/1924; she died on October 5, 2019 at age 95.  She was musically inclined at an early age. At seven, she was taking piano lessons.  At nine, she was studying piano with a concert pianist and playing at PTA meetings.  In junior high and high school, she learned to play the string bass.  She was also the pianist for the voice class and glee club.  She graduated from USC with a bachelor’s degree in Music Education, having played in many stage productions during college.  After college, she volunteered for the USO and was secretly taken to bases to entertain the troops. In the 1950’s, she moved to Long Beach and taught music in junior high and high school.  She later worked as a substitute teacher for the LBUSD.  She also played for summer stock at the Alpert JCC.

She moved to Ventura in 1998 and played piano for Temple Beth Torah.  In 2002, she moved to Leisure Village where she formed and directed the singing group “The Rhythmettes.”  In 2014, she moved into the Ventura TowneHouse and started the “TowneHouse Choraliers.”  In 2019, Irene moved back to Leisure Village to live with and be cared for by her daughter Adriene.

Shewas married to Jack Marion, Harold Alpert, and Harry Olson, all of whom are deceased.  She is survived by her daughters Jan Childs (Ken) and Adriene Alpert Cardan, her grandchildren Richard Gauvin (Kimberly), Christina McIntire (Michael), and James Cobb, as well as three great-grandchildren:  Natalie Gauvin, Nicholas Gauvin, and Ailey McIntire.

Her friend Es Cole remarked “Irene gave and gave of herself and her talent. Wherever she now, I know there is an audience clapping in rhythm as Irene plays and plays, the piano she loves.”

by Jill Forman

Do not cast me away when I am old;

Do not forsake me when my strength is gone… Psalm 71

In Ventura County there are approximately 8,000 residents of long-term care facilities: nursing homes, assisted living facilities and board and care homes. Almost one-half of all Americans over 65 will spend some time in a long-term care facility. Sixty percent of nursing home residents have no family or friends who visit or check on them.

This is where the Ombudsman program comes in. Ombudsmen are volunteer advocates for the rights and needs of elderly and disabled residents. They investigate and resolve complaints, serve as intermediaries, and work to assure the highest quality of life and care possible. They benefit the staff as well as the residents; their early intervention can help small complaints from becoming big ones.

They not only assist those without families; relatives and friends as well as the residents themselves can contact the program. Families often are also suffering from trauma and grief. Ombudsman can provide pre-placement counseling to alleviate some of the difficulties.

Sylvia Taylor-Stein, Executive Director for the past 20 years, says that this is “…great work.” She came from the private sector and was looking for something to “…bring more meaning to my life.” She beams as she talks about the program, the volunteers, and the procedure that has been established to ensure everyone is contacted.

Every nursing home in the county, nineteen of them, are visited by a volunteer weekly. Any new resident gets a visit from an Ombudsman who gets to know the person, their situation, and if any help is needed. Many residents have a real sense of loss and grief, having given up their home and independence. It is vital for them to realize that they have rights as much as anyone else. They need to feel they are in charge in some areas; so much of their life is out of their control already. Visits to facilities are unscheduled and unannounced. The Ombudsman poster is posted in plain view in all facilities. All services are free of charge and confidential.

If someone has a complaint, the volunteers will talk to the resident, staff, families and other involved people. They are what Taylor-Stein describes as “Express wish advocates,” acting on behalf of the resident. Their goal is to resolve problems to the satisfaction of the resident. If there is a list with multiple complaints, they will help the resident prioritize. It’s also important to realize the advocate may not be able to solve all problems.

All advocates, staff and volunteers complete 51 hours of core training and mentorship, as well as continuing education. There are currently 53 volunteers and 6 staff members. Advocates come from teaching, business, medicine, every area of life.

Ombudsman 805-656-1986 Afterhours Crisis Line 800-231-4024

[email protected]

by Kenneth I. Moch, President and CEO of Cognition Therapeutics

More than 120,000 Americans will lose their battle to Alzheimer’s disease this year. This debilitating condition is the nation’s sixth-leading cause of death.

Nationwide, someone in the United States develops Alzheimer’s disease every 65 seconds. Nearly 6 million Americans currently live with this devastating condition. By 2050, that number could skyrocket to nearly 14 million, costing the country well over $1 trillion annually.

To avoid this societal tsunami, we need to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, our leaders in Washington are considering policies that would make it nearly impossible for scientists to develop such treatments.

The path to discovering the next Alzheimer’s breakthrough is paved with peril. Innovative companies of all sizes have tried, but not one of nearly 90 programs launched over the past 15 years has succeeded. The cumulative estimated cost of developing a new Alzheimer’s drug is nearly $6 billion — twice the cost of developing the average drug.

Despite these astronomical costs and disheartening odds, many are striving to conquer this disease. For example, my team at Cognition Therapeutics, a clinical-stage neuroscience company in Pennsylvania, is working on a novel approach to protecting and restoring synapses — the brain’s electrical circuitry — in Alzheimer’s disease.

There are approximately 70 clinical-stage Alzheimer’s research programs underway. These trials seek to stop, prevent, or slow the progression of the disease. Small biotech companies like mine account for almost 80 percent of these programs.

Several government proposals threaten to stifle these advances.

The Trump administration wants to tie Medicare reimbursements for certain drugs to the reimbursement rates in other developed countries, where government officials use price controls to keep drug costs artificially low.

Meanwhile, some in Congress want to overhaul how Medicare pays for drugs. Right now, Medicare drug prices are set through negotiations between drug makers and insurance companies. These intense negotiations work extremely well in driving down costs for patients and taxpayers. It’s why the Medicare prescription drug program is so popular with seniors and has come in under budget.

However, under a proposal popular on Capitol Hill, the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be empowered to directly negotiate the price for hundreds of drugs. The federal government would likely set prices well below a drug’s fair market value, and its decisions would be final and legally binding.

These policies would prove disastrous for Alzheimer’s researchers, who already struggle to attract funding for their projects. From 2008 to 2017, U.S. biotech startups that research Alzheimer’s drummed up just one-sixteenth as much venture capital funding as startups researching cancer, even though Alzheimer’s currently costs our healthcare system over twice as much as cancer.

It’s important to ensure that medicines are affordable. But there won’t be any breakthrough medicines if we adopt policies that dissuade investors from funding risky research projects.

Brilliant scientists are working tirelessly to deliver new treatments to patients in need. Painting these innovators as villains may be good politics, but it hinders their ability to save and improve lives.

We also can never lose sight of the needs of our family and friends who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease — or will in the years to come. There are millions of people who, like me, have watched as the essence of a loved one slips away.

We are on the cusp of medical breakthroughs that will benefit current and future generations — as long as our leaders don’t discourage scientists and investors from tackling the world’s most devastating and debilitating diseases.

To help meet the urgent need for therapies that will effectively treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) has launched two new research centers with funding expected to total more than $73 million over the next five years. The Alzheimer Centers for the Discovery of New Medicines are designed to diversify and reinvigorate the Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline. NIA is part of the National Institutes of Health.

The centers will provide added infrastructure for developing high-quality research tools and technologies needed to validate and advance the next generation of drug targets for Alzheimer’s disease. Data, research methodologies, and computational and experimental tools will be disseminated openly and free-of-charge to the broader research community—including academia and industry—for use in drug discovery and in research to better understand the complex biology of the disease.

The Accelerating Medicines Partnership-Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD) program’s open-science enterprise, which has provided more than 500 new candidate targets for Alzheimer’s disease, served as the foundation for the new centers.

“Through these centers, NIH will expand the use of open-science and open-source principles to de-risk novel drug targets with the goal of facilitating the development of new treatments for Alzheimer’s,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

With the growing aging population, Alzheimer’s disease is among the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century. It affects an estimated 5.6 million people age 65 and older in the U.S. alone, a number that could rise as high as 14 million by 2050 without effective treatment and prevention. There are few current treatments approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and several recent, late-stage clinical trials testing disease-modifying drug candidates have failed.

“Drug development for Alzheimer’s disease is a challenging, costly and high-risk endeavor,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “The launch of these centers marks a strategic step forward in our multi-pronged approach to accelerating discovery and development of treatments and cures for Alzheimer’s.”

The Alzheimer Centers for the Discovery of New Medicines grants were awarded to two multi-institutional research teams with extensive experience in developing and promoting open-access science practices. Each team brings together world-class expertise in data science, computational biology, disease biology, structural biology, assay development, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and clinical science.

The Indiana University School of Medicine Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Discovery center will be led by Alan Palkowitz, Ph.D., and Bruce Lamb, Ph.D., at Indiana University, Indianapolis, with researchers from Purdue University, West Lafayette. The center will bridge target discovery work done by the AMP-AD program with newly discovered molecules that will be studied for disease-modifying potential in Alzheimer’s disease animal models, specifically those based on human pathology, genetics and translational biomarkers developed by the NIA-supported Model Organism Development & Evaluation for Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium.

The Alzheimer Centers for the Discovery of New Medicines are funded through NIA grant numbers U54AG065187 and U54AG065181.

Volunteers Sylvia Fulton, Gordon Dilger and Louise Dilger were recognized by the California Park and Recreation Society as volunteers with the RSVP Bone Builders program with the 2019 Service Award of Excellence: Champions of the Community award. RSVP Bone Builders is a free osteoporosis exercise and education program offered in all four local cities served by Oxnard’s RSVP program.  Volunteers, who must be age 55 or better, help in all capacities of the program, including as master trainers, classroom instructors and the social support system included in each class. In the past fiscal year, RSVP Bone Builders volunteers served over 14,000 hours, the equivalent of nearly seven full-time employees.

On October 28, the House of Representatives passed the Dignity in Aging Act of 2019 (H.R. 4334), which reauthorizes the Older Americans Act (OAA) – key legislation governing the organization and delivery of critical services for senior citizens throughout the nation.

H.R. 4334 promotes seniors’ ability to live independently in their homes by supplying Area Agencies on Aging (AAAs) the necessary funds and resources to effectively serve one of our nation’s most vulnerable populations. OAA’s elder care strategy includes comprehensive programs to deliver meals at senior centers, schools and churches. It also includes care to prevent abuse and exploitation of seniors, provides family caregiver support systems and offers community service employment opportunities.

Specifically, the Dignity in Aging Act eliminates the arbitrary cap on the percentage of funding AAAs can use to provide services to older caregivers raising younger relatives. These provisions will be especially beneficial for Kentuckians where, in the midst of the opioid crisis, many older relatives have taken on the responsibilities of raising children whose parents are not present or are unable to take care of them.

“As the lead Republican on this legislation and the lead Republican on the Education and Labor subcommittee of jurisdiction, it has been a privilege to work on this important, bipartisan legislation on behalf of our nation’s seniors. The increased funding authorized through this bill will aid Kentucky’s Area Development Districts – which serve as the AAAs for the Commonwealth – in their efforts to provide a range of comprehensive services to an increasing population of older Americans. My constituency of seniors are engaged, independent contributors to their communities. This legislation will help them maintain that independence and continue to live active, healthy lives in their homes and communities,” Congressman Comer said.

Almost anyone, at any age, can exercise safely and get meaningful benefits. You can be active even if you have a chronic condition, like heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis. Staying safe while you exercise is always important, whether you’re just starting a new activity or haven’t been active for a long time.

Older woman stretching her triceps and smiling

Over-exercising can cause injury, which may lead to quitting. A steady rate of progress is the best approach.

To play it safe and reduce your risk of injury:

Begin your exercise program slowly with low-intensity exercises.

Wear appropriate shoes for your activity.

Warm up before exercising and cool down afterward.

Pay attention to your surroundings when exercising outdoors.

Drink water before, during, and after your workout session, even if you don’t feel thirsty.

Dress appropriately for the temperature outdoors or opt for an indoor activity if it’s very hot or cold.

If you have specific health conditions, discuss your exercise and physical activity plan with your health care provider.

Endurance. Listen to your body. Your breathing may become faster, but you should still be able to talk.

Strength. You will need a chair to do many of the strength exercises on the Go4Life website. Be sure to choose one that is sturdy.

Balance. Have that sturdy chair handy or a person nearby to hold on to for your balance exercises if you feel unsteady.

Flexibility. Always warm up before stretching exercises—a few minutes of walking works well.

Talking with Your Healthcare Provider

Most people don’t need to check with their healthcare provider first before doing physical activity. However, you may want to talk with your healthcare provider if you aren’t active and you want to start a vigorous exercise program or significantly increase your physical activity. Your activity level is an important topic to discuss with your healthcare provider as part of your ongoing health care.

Each year, more than 2 million older Americans go to the emergency room because of fall-related injuries. A simple fall can cause a serious fracture of the arm, hand, ankle, or hip.

But don’t let a fear of falling keep you from exercising and being physically active. Overcoming this fear can help you stay active, maintain your physical health, and prevent future falls. The good news is that there are simple ways you can prevent most falls.

One of the most important ways to prevent falls is to stay physically active. Regular exercise makes you stronger. Weight-bearing activities, such as walking or climbing stairs, may slow bone loss from osteoporosis. Lower-body strength exercises and balance exercises can help you prevent falls and avoid the disability that may result from falling.

Balance exercises can help you prevent falls and avoid the disability that may result from falling. You can do balance exercises almost anytime, anywhere, and as often as you like, as long as you have something sturdy nearby to hold on to for support.

Try these balance exercises: stand on one foot, walk heel to toe, and walk in a straight line with one foot in front of the other. A number of lower-body strength exercises—especially those that strengthen your legs and ankles—also can help improve your balance. These include the back leg raise, side leg raise, knee curl, and toe stand exercises.

In the beginning, using a chair or the wall for support will help you work on your balance safely.

More Fall Prevention Tips

Have your eyes and hearing tested often. Always wear your glasses when you need them. If you have a hearing aid, be sure it fits well, and wear it.

Find out about the side effects of any medicine you take. If a drug makes you sleepy or dizzy, tell your doctor or pharmacist.

Get enough sleep. If you’re sleepy, you’re more likely to fall.

Limit the amount of alcohol you drink. Even a small amount can affect balance and reflexes.

Stand up slowly after eating, lying down, or sitting. Getting up too quickly can cause your blood pressure to drop, which can make you feel faint.

Wear rubber-soled, low-heeled shoes that fully support your feet. Wearing only socks or shoes/slippers with smooth soles on stairs or floors without carpet can be unsafe.

by Rick Beavin, California Market President Humana

People with Medicare have until Saturday, Dec. 7 to select their Medicare Advantage or Prescription Drug Plan coverage for 2020. To ensure you have the right Medicare plan in place come January 1 of next year, it’s important to focus on these four key questions:

Are my doctors in network? Use online tools to confirm which doctors and hospitals are in a plan’s network. A licensed health insurance agent can also help you see if a specific doctor or hospital is in a plan’s network and taking new patients, and determine what’s in network if you’re a seasonal resident.

Are my prescription drugs covered? Although Original Medicare does not cover most prescription drugs, many Medicare Advantage plans include prescription drug coverage, or you can sign up for a Part D Prescription Drug Plan separately. A licensed sales agent can look up the medications you would like covered and help you estimate what the cost of each drug would be on a plan.

What new, innovative benefits are available? Beyond vision, hearing and dental coverage, if you aim to become healthier, look for fitness program benefits as many Medicare Advantage plans offer a gym membership. If you travel or appreciate technology, virtual doctor visits are helpful when you can’t see a doctor right away. Most Medicare Advantage plans now offer transportation to doctor appointments and the gym, when a fitness center membership is offered as a plan benefit.

What if I’m still working? If you or your spouse have health insurance from an employer, you may be able to delay enrolling in Medicare until the employment or the coverage stops. At that point, you would be entitled to a special enrollment period of up to eight months to sign up for Medicare without incurring any late penalties. Talk with your employer to find out how your coverage works with Medicare.

While the clock is ticking until the Dec. 7 Medicare annual enrollment deadline, remember you’re not alone. Take advantage of resources including licensed sales agents and websites such as medicare.gov and www.humana.com/medicare. You can also call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) (or TTY: 1-877-486-2048) 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or call Humana at 1-800-213-5286 (TTY: 711) 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time seven days a week.