GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE

E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations

February 23, 2010 — Volume 10, Number 3

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO or if you'd like to be removed from the list, simply auto-reply to this issue of GBO, or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133 (e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org). GBO extends a special thanks for help on this issue to Kevin Chan, Sandy Close and Eileen Beal. Now including GBO's do-it-yourself copy-editing feature. (It's sort of like an editorial Where's Waldo.)

IN THIS ISSUE: One Politician's Transparency is Another's Grandstanding

1. TOUGH NEWS FOR HARD TIMES: ETHNIC ELDERS HIT BY RECESSION: Two New Studies

2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: NAM and GBO in DC This Week for Ethnic Media Fellowship Program on Aging; Joe Shapiro Goes Investigative at NPR; Correct Contact for Russo Book on Sibling Caregivers

3. CALENDAR & RESOURCES: Health Care Journalists Fellowship Deadline for Ethnic Media This Friday; Administration on Aging Deploys New Website on Legal Advocacy

4. BEAL'S BEAT: Eileen Beal Reviews Two Books That Show "How to Think Like a Doc, Write Like a Pro"

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1. TOUGH NEWS FOR HARD TIMES: ETHNIC ELDERS HIT BY RECESSION

Two new studies show how hard-hit ethnic older Americans have been hit by the recession, and how important Social Security is for ethnic elders and those with disabilities.

Today (Feb. 23), AARP released "African American Experiences in the Economy: Recession Effects More Strongly Felt." According to an AARP release, the survey, part of AARP's continued look at how Americans age 45-plus are faring in this economy, found that over the last 12 months, a third of midlife and older African Americans had problems paying rent or mortgage, and 44% had problems paying for essential items, such as food and utilities. Nearly twice as many African Americans 45-plus lost a job than the general population (18% vs. 10%), and almost one in four (23%) lost their employer-sponsored health insurance.

"African Americans have taken some positive steps to lessen the sting of the recession," says the summary. "Half of those surveyed postponed plans to travel and two-thirds (67%) cut entertainment expenses. Even in the tough employment environment, 12% of African Americans age 65-plus returned to the workforce from retirement, while 19% of African Americans age 45 to 64 increased the number of hours worked and 12% took a second job."

Despite these kinds of moves, older African Americans "have been forced to make increasingly difficult decisions to cope with this economic downturn — decisions that could have serious long-term consequences." Among them are that one-third stopped putting money into a 401(k), IRA or other retirement account, and a quarter prematurely withdrew funds from their retirement nest eggs to pay for living expenses.

For more information or to view the complete survey, visit http://www.aarp.org/research/surveys/money/econ/trends/articles/economyaa.html or contact AARP Media Relations at 202-434-2560.

Meanwhile, the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), a nonpartisan think tank in DC, released "Tough Times Require Strong Benefits: Views on Social Security Among African Americans, Hispanic Americans and White Americans" by Maya Rockeymoore and Melissa Maitin-Shepard. Rockeymoore, who will be the featured lunch speaker at the New America Media fellowship seminar for ethnic-media journalists this Saturday, heads Global Policy Solutions, where Maitin-Shepard serves as policy associate.

In their analysis of a survey NASI commissioned last summer, the two researchers determined that while all Americans firmly believe in Social Security's value to society and want government leaders to protect the program for future generations, African Americans and Hispanics, who are more heavily reliant on Social Security benefits, express even stronger support for Social Security than whites.

A key findings is that 88 percent of African Americans, 84 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of whites agree "preserving Social Security for future generations is critical, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes on workers." The poll also found that when given a choice between cutting taxes and benefits or strengthening Social Security in response to the economic crisis and large deficit, 73 percent of African Americans, 67 percent of Hispanics, and 66 percent of whites support strengthening Social Security over cutting benefits.

A press summary is posted at http://tinyurl.com/y9fnk7a, and a PDF of the 16-page paper is at http://tinyurl.com/yarfpx7.

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2. GEN BEATLES NEWS

GBO Heads to DC Next Week for Ethnic Journalists' Seminar: New America Media's (NAM) Ethnic Elders Newsbeat has chosen a baker's dozen journalists from ethnic media outlets head for the nation's capital Feb. 26-27, for a two-day immersion in all stories aging. This ethnic-elders news program is sponsored by The Atlantic Philanthropies.

Special luncheon speaker keynoter will be Jeanette Takamura, Dean of Columbia, University's School of Social Work, former Clinton administration U.S. Assistant Secretary of Aging. Saturday's featured luncheon speaker will be Maya Rockeymoore, director of Leadership for Healthy Communities and president of Global Solution. Previously, she was VP of Research and Programs at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She is the author of The Political Action Handbook: A How to for the Hip Hop Generation and co-editor of Strengthening Community: Social Insurance in a Diverse America.

The selected reporters and editors constitute a virtual United Nations of American Journalism. They include Lotus Chau, Editor, Sing Tao Daily New York City; Maricar Hampton, Reporter, Philippine News, Laurel, MD; Karen Holish, Contributing Writer/Editor, News from Indian Country, Minneapolis; Kausar Javaid, Washington Bureau Chief, Pakistan Post Weekly Newspaper, Alexandria, VA; Ewa Kern- Jedrychowska, Nowy Dziennik/Polish Daily News and Feet in Two Worlds, New York City; Araceli Martínez Ortega, Northern California Correspondent, La Opinión, (Los Angeles); Julie Pham, Publisher/Producer, Nguoi Viet Tay Bac/Northwest Vietnamese News, Seattle; Rebecca Rivas, Staff Reporter/Web video Producer, St. Louis American Newspaper, St. Louis; DeVaun Sanders, Contributor, PhxSoul.com, Phoenix; M. Kay Siblani, Executive Editor, The Arab American News, Dearborn, MI; Sunita Sohrabji, Staff Reporter, India West, San Leandro, CA; Abu Taher, Editor, Bangla Patrika, New York City; and Nahmyo Thomas, Contributor, RedWoodAge.com/Newswire21.org, San Francisco.

***Joseph Shapiro Goes Investigative at NPR: Long-time NPR health and aging reporter Joe Shapiro has been tapped to joining NPR's new Investigations Unit. He e-mailed GBO, "Although I won't have my regular aging, disability and health beat, I will have a chance to do stories related to aging as investigative projects." So dust off the old trench coat, Joe, and start digging.

Joe will speak at the NAM seminar for ethnic reporters this weekend on a panel of generations-beat news and information vets. Joining him will be Jim Toedtman, editor of AARP Bulletin and Judy Diaz, who is heading up the 'Next Avenue" initiative aimed at increasing PBS programming for the 50-plus audience.

***OOPS! Correct Contact on Russo's Caregiving Book: GBO's editor got his butterfingers on the keyboard in the last issue and provided on half-correct information for contacting Francine Russo's publisher. (The phone number was OK.) Journalists wishing a review copy of Francine's new book, They're Your Parents, Too! How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents' Aging Without Driving Each Other Crazy (Bantam) should contact Random House publicist Cindy Murray, 212-782-8292, cmurray@randomehouse.com. To reach Russo, e-mail francine.russo.email@gmail.com.

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3. CALENDAR & RESOURCES

*** AHCJ-Ethnic Media Deadline This Friday: The Association of Health Care Journalists is offering the AHCJ-Ethnic Media Outlet Health Journalism Fellowships for journalists from the ethnic media to attend the organization's national conference in Chicago, April 21-25, 2010. Deadline: February 26, 2010.

Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the fellowships are open to full-time journalists working at one of the nation's ethnic media outlets - print, broadcast or online. Ethnic media is defined here as serving a predominantly minority or ethnic audience.

Fellowships include: all conference registration fees, a one year membership in the AHCJ (new or extended), up to four nights in the conference hotel, and up to $350 travel stipend. For more information and an application go to http://www.healthjournalism.org/secondarypage-details.php?id=478. Please complete the application form and email to Christy@healthjournalism.org.

*** AoA Launches Site for New Legal Resource Center: The U.S. Administration on Aging (AoA) has deployed a new website for its National Legal Resource Center. The agency created NLRC in 2008 to help legal and aging-services advocates with the resources for providing high-quality legal assistance to seniors "facing direct threats to their ability to live independently in their homes and communities," said an AoA release. The new website is at www.nlrc.aoa.gov.

NLRC is collaboration between five national nonprofit organizations known for their work in legal and aging-services support. The new site provides professionals and advocates in aging and law with streamlined access to important resource support, including case consultation and training on the most difficult legal issues facing older persons. AoA funds over 1,000 legal-services providers that render nearly one-million hours of legal assistance per year. Seniors face such legal challenges as the loss of their homes through foreclosure, consumer scams that destroy nest eggs and steal identities, and difficulties in accessing public benefits essential to their well being. 

The five national non-profit organizations of the NLRC are:

• National Senior Citizens Law Center (http://www.nsclc.org);
• National Consumer Law Center (http://www.consumerlaw.org);
• The Center for Social Gerontology (http://www.tcsg.org);
• The Center for Elder Rights Advocacy (http://www.legalhotlines.org);
• American Bar Association-Commission on Law and Aging (http://www.abanet.org/aging).

More information on the new Web site and the National Legal Resource Center is available by contacting Omar.Valverde@aoa.hhs.gov. For more information about the programs and services of the Administration on Aging, please visit: www.aoa.gov.

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4. BEAL'S BEAT

How to Think Like a Doc, Write Like a Pro

By Eileen Beal

The defining event this week promises to be President Obama's televised health care showdown with Republicans. But the underlying theme will be the two defining events of the first half of the 20th Century — the Great Depression and World War II. Those historical events put a hold on childbearing in the US that lasted almost 15 years. Making up for lost time, from January 1946 through 1964, about 76 million babies — boomers — were born, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

Fast forward 65 years for each of those babies (and the 2 million-or-so naturalized citizens born elsewhere during the baby boom years), and you get an inkling of the magnitude of the elder-boomer force headed our way.

Many GBO readers can expect to be writing about the first boomers to sign up for Medicare next January, and the silver-haired population is going to change just about every healthcare institution in the U.S. Boomers aren't going to change things because they will need more medical care — older people have always needed more than younger people. They are going to change things because or their numbers, their greater education level, their more substantial wealth and related factors.

So if you are writing about the healthcare needs of the individuals who make up this new "elder culture," as author Theodore Roszak has called it — older adults, seniors, boomers, silver foxes, whatever you want to call them — think seriously about reading the following two books (and those listed at the end of this piece).

How Doctors Think, by oncologist, Harvard professor and sometime New Yorker and New Republic writer Jerome Groopman, Chief of Experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is an excellent read for journalists looking for insights to help them cover the age boom impact on healthcare.

It's full of straightforward and honest interviews with primary care physicians and specialists. Their insights into how doctors think about specific diseases and conditions, how they arrive at a diagnosis, how and why they do or don't explain the pros and cons of every treatment option that is available to their patients, and how they have to push themselves to move out of their "comfort zones" — are the vitamins and fiber of this book.

Every chapter is an education in the questions journalists covering senior issues should be asking when they interview healthcare professionals. And every chapter captures the "uncertainty" that doctors are dealing with and in when they are treating patients with the kinds of complex and often multifactorial conditions many older patients bring with them to the office and hospital.

Of special note are insights on the hyper-specialization that has made physicians overly-dependant on technology. This development in medicine, cautions Groopman, often precludes doctors from thinking outside the medical box and leads to "a certain degree of contempt for alternatives." And it leads to missed opportunities.

Groopman also provides excellent insight into the impact third parties — insurance companies, relentless drug and medical device salesmen, well-meaning family members — have on patient care. With dead-on accuracy, he points out many of the obstacles and challenges that come with treating elders. Far too often they are melodramatic and demanding, demented or non-compliant with therapy. Those kinds of patients, noted one of the physicians interviewed in the book, "make physicians feel like Sisyphus."

The "cure" Groopman offers for dealing with this whole cascade of problems is better communication between patient (and their family) and physician. Even a leisurely reading of How Doctors Think will turn up scores of tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies that will help journalists help their readers better communicate their needs and wants.

The other book, Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics, by Drs. Steve Woloshin, Lisa Schwartz and Gilbert Welch, sounds dry and dull. It's not.

Written by this trio of VA Hospital physicians and Dartmouth professors, it's a crisply and cleverly written primer for non-statisticians, who, nevertheless, have the job of interpreting and explaining health statistics sometimes falls.

Using lots of easy-to-understand (and often humorous) examples, graphs, charts, check-up quizzes, random factoids and Dilbert cartoons, the book doesn't merely help you understand health statistics, it gives tips on how to explain them, especially the risk vs. benefit quandary and the absolute and relative risk mind-boggler.

In addition, Know Your Chances suggests ways to distinguish real outcomes (such as condition improvement) from surrogate outcomes, such as symptom improvement, explains the levels and credibility of scientific trials and studies, and provides examples and strategies one can use to help readers develop a healthy skepticism about the hype and hope they see in full-page newspaper ads and articles.

Know Your Chances also includes a great glossary (for those short medical definitions you're always looking for), but a not so great list of healthcare agencies and on-line medical/healthcare libraries.

The above two books are just the tip of the iceberg. For more reading that will get you thinking about, and better able to explain, older adults' health and medical issues, see:

How to Survive Your Doctor's Care, Pamela F. Gallin, MD, FACS

What to Ask the Doc:The questions to ask to get the answers you need, Margaret Fitzpatrick, RN, Linda Burke, RN, Daryl Lee, RN

The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right, Atul Gawande, MD, MPH (Anything by this author-physician-political gadfly, who also writes piercingly insightful articles for Slate and New Yorker Magazine, is worth reading!)

The Merck Manual of Health & Aging, Mark H. Beers, MD, et al. which is available on-line at: http://www.merck.com/pubs/mmanual_ha/contents.html.

Eileen Beal, a regular contributor to GBO, is a freelance columnist and writer based in Cleveland and coauthor of Age Well: The Cleveland Clinic Guide to Healthy Aging (2007) with Robert Palmer, MD.

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The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG) publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO readers are invited to visit the NAM website, www.newamericamedia.org, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2012, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman, pkleyman@newamericamedia.org.)

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