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The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents from the Perils of Modern Healthcare

( In a powerful blending of memoir and practical strategi...)

In a powerful blending of memoir and practical strategies from a medical doctor’s perspective, The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents – and ourselves - from the Perils of Modern Healthcare reveals the hidden side of modern healthcare practices for aging Americans. This ground-breaking book, co-written by award-winning author Marcy Houle and nationally-recognized geriatrician and public health advocate, Elizabeth Eckstrom MD MPH, sheds new light on aging by showing it from twin perspectives: the story of a daughter desperately seeking help for the parents she loves, and a geriatrician who offers life-changing strategies that can protect our loved ones and ourselves. Today, for many older adults, the medical delivery system is confusing, fragmented, and ill-equipped to provide comprehensive, person-centered care. Under our current healthcare model, thousands of aging persons face unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations and nursing home stays, and even preventable death. Seniors and families often feel powerless as they travel this sad journey. Not having knowledge of aging’s changes, they resign themselves to believing there is nothing anyone can do to help, while some health care professionals simply write off symptoms seniors endure as “just old age.” But as Marcy Houle discovered in caring for her parents, many of the problems often are not “just old age.” Further, the real issue is not that the answers to ease suffering don’t exist. Rather, what we need to know is generally not available to the general public. Even more concerning, many health care professionals have had little or no training in the care of older adults. The Gift of Caring hopes to change that. It is written to give empowerment to all older adults, family members, and health care professionals, by sharing much needed knowledge and practical strategies. The Gift of Caring shows the best ways to advocate for our parent’s health care … and our own … by giving us the tools we need to insist upon the better way. Your parents and you deserve the best healthcare as you age- But there are so many reasons why that’s not happening.You can change that.

Prairie Keepers - Secrets Of The Grasslands

Wings for my flight: The peregrine falcons of Chimney Rock

(Marcy Cottrell Houle spent four and a half months atop a ...)

The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents from the Perils of Modern Healthcare by Marcy Cottrell Houle M.S. (2015-07-01)

Prairie Keepers: Secrets Of The Grasslands (Tucked away in the far corner of remote northeastern Oreg...)

Marcy Houle

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writer wildlife biologist

Background

Marcy Houle is a fifth-generation Oregonian, the daughter of George (a prominent orthopedic surgeon) and Margaret Cottrell. When she was born, her family lived on 13 acres (53 ha) of old-growth forest in southwest Portland.

Education

Houle attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where she studied biology.

Career

She lives in Portland, Oregon. She spent summers after college working for the Colorado Division of Wildlife studying peregrine falcons near Chimney Rock National Monument. After enrolling in Oregon State University to earn a master"s in biology, she studied raptors on Zumwalt Prairie for the United States. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Her research there helped lead to the prairie becoming a nature preserve.

Houle"s 30-year interest in Forest Park in Portland culminated in a wildlife and vegetation study that the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) published in 1988 as One City"s Wilderness: Portland"s Forest Park. OHS published a second edition of the book in 1996, and in 2010 Oregon State University Press published the third edition

The third edition includes maps of the park by cartographer Erik Goetze and images by photographers Gerry Carr and Lois Miller. In addition to Wings for My Flight and One City"s Wilderness, her publications include a third book, The Prairie Keepers: Secrets of the Zumwalt.

Her work has also appeared in The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Reader"s Digest, The New York Times, and other periodicals.

Achievements

Wings for My Flight was awarded an Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction in 1991, a Christopher Award in 1992, and the same year New York Public Library named the book one of the Best Books for the Teenaged. The Prairie Keepers was named a Booklist Editor"s Choice. lieutenant was also named an Earth Day Reader"s Selection by The New York Times.