Hello and welcome into the Senior Care Show where're to discuss the latest tips and resources for elder and senior care services. Now, each episode of the show will be talking with industry experts and caregivers to bring you some valuable information and insights helping you navigate the complex world of senior care. Whether you're looking for information on assisted living facilities, in-home care, or other options, we've got you covered. So join us as we explore the sen, the world of senior care, and help you make informed. For yourself and your loved ones. One of our principal members here on the senior care show is Michael Watkins. Michael is an author, and of course someone who's worked in this field for a while protecting your assets with tax-free long-term care as his book. Tell us a little bit about your book and how you decided to come up with this idea for the senior care show. Michael. Yeah. So I work in the long-term care space and more importantly, just a, a total retirement planning picture. Gotcha. But I wanted to write the book to let people know there are different resources that they can tap into, whether they're a veteran. There's ways to move your assets around to, you know, protect yourself against this thing. Right now, we don't know whether or not we're gonna. . Right. Okay. My hope is I die in my sleep next to my wife, , but guess what? I don't get to choose. Right. So with that being said protecting yourself from with long-term care insurance is a good idea. However, there's so many things in life, you know? Yeah. We can't control and one of. Happens to be our cognitive abilities as we age. And so I've run into a lot of people in the industry and I've invited two guests to join us today that are going to talk to us specifically about cognitive impairment. Okay. Are the senior care show. Tell us about these guests that you've brought on. Well, Dr. Bernstein, Dr. David Bernstein and Michael Parker. There they are, and Dr. Bernstein is a, a retired physician, and Michael Parker has a new, I, I would just call it a Netflix for. , all types of cognitive. This is really cool what you guys hear about this. Yeah. Dr. Bernstein, tell us a little bit about your your experience here. I practiced internal medicine at Geriatrics for 40 years, and then in the final 15 years of that, I started expressing myself through writing and as it relates to retirement and cognitive impairment. There's a lot of things I observed and I, and I talk about and wrote. and, and so it's exciting for me to be able to share all this stuff all the time. So given this opportunity, I, I would say that, It, it's one of the things that people fear the most in life, that they'll lose some of their cognitive abilities. And, and so I explored that and I came up with five ways in which we can do things to help ourselves and prevent that. And, and I think it's really important to talk about and, and really the things that are. Common as causes of illness or heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, cognitive impairment, and, and there are things we can do about it. So I'll just take right off and tell you that sugar and sweets are really hazardous for us. So I, I tell people to avoid sweets and adjust their eating lifestyle. . A second is I tell people that stress contributes to ch chemical changes in our body. Absolutely. And there are things we can do to reduce our stress. It may require changing jobs or changing employers, but it also requires finding time to meditate or do things that we really enjoy and take our minds off of. right? Things we don't enjoy. That's an absolute skill for sure. And, and then the third one is get more sweat. Exercise. 30 to 60 minutes a day, five days a week, has been shown to reduce the risk of cognitive decline. And it's also one of the key features that people would benefit from if they're receiving chemotherapy for cancer prevention. And then their sleep. And in the final years in my practice, I discovered an immense number of patients who had sleep disorders, particularly sleep apnea. And the, the lack of sleep and the lack of rest during that sleep period also contributed to cognitive decline. And lastly, since if anybody's noticed, every one of my items that I've mentioned so far begins with letter S. So the final one is sex. Now I put sex in my power of five because sex sells. And our generation was brought up that sex cells. So it's there, but it's really about socialization. It's about connections. It's about. And, and I write about it because intimacy or the, the opposite of intimacy is loneliness. And that's a health hazard. And older adults, as they, they move toward retirement, they lose some of their connections. People die and they find themselves stranded on an island, and that's as hazardous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being obese. . So combining those five letters, the five S's in my Power of Five Formula, puts together a structure that people can ...
