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Complete Guide to Alzheimers Proofing Your Home$29.95Purchase Complete Guide to Alzheimers Proofing Your Home Here is a book that will profoundly improve the environmental quality of caring for a person with Alzheimer's disease at home. Author: Mark L. Warner Book Review 1A Book Review by Geri Richard Hall, Ph.D. c., ARNP, CNSGerontology Clinical Nurse Specialist Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, Arizona A Complete Guide to Alzheimer's's--Proofing Your Home is a comprehensive practical guide for helping in-home caregivers and health professionals who advise them, to evaluate the home environment and make modifications enhancing safety and function. Easy to read, the book offers the reader numerous new ideas on every page, each with the potential solve some small yet vexing problem. The book begins with an overview of how to evaluate the rooms and exterior areas of a typical home and how to formulate a plan that facilitates maximum function for both the care-recipient and caregiver. A strength of the book is the second chapter. It provides a disease overview focusing on symptom presentation and how it affects day to day function. This is particularly helpful for the caregiver as it explains how a symptom/behavior is represented in their home. Quotes familiar to professionals working with families help caregivers to recognize how this relates to their own situation. These quotes help to give the book focus and direction, but more important, the quotes provide a very empathetic and "human" touch and make the book highly readable. I find this approach much more salient than "academic approaches" to the description of dementia. Another strength is the glossary of terms, which is comprehensive and simple to understand. It can help the caregiver speak with health care professionals or understand recommendations - a problem even when the professional speaks in the simplest possible terms. A last strength is the recommendation of products designed for people with AD or for other purposes, but work well for people with AD. The authors have included a shopping guide for convenience of the reader. While this will need to be updated every few years, it is an invaluable resource. A Complete Guide to Alzheimer's-Proofing Your Home is a well-written thoughtful collection of ideas for home-based caregivers. The one drawback to the book is that it reinforces how terribly complex caring for people with dementia can be. The comprehensive table of contents can help caregivers sort out what they need to examine for each problem. This is a new approach to AD care and should, in my opinion, be an invaluable addition to the "Alzheimer's professional's" library. Geri
Richard Hall, Ph.D. c., ARNP, CNS Book Review 2A Review by Beverly Bigtree Murphy, MS, CRC,Caregiver, Advocate, Author The Complete Guide to Alzheimer's-Proofing Your Home is remarkable. It is about time caregivers, of family members with Alzheimer's disease, were offered something more than reasons to institutionalize their people. Caregivers need information, options, and where to access tools and resources before they can make informed decisions about their role as caregiver. As someone who spent 25 years designing rehabilitation plans for the handicapped and another 10 years facing the care of my husband Tom, who died of this disease, in his home, in 1995, this is the first volume I have read that speaks of caregiving in positive, life-giving terms. While it offers pragmatic, workable, affordable solutions to caregivers, it never loses sight of the continued humanity and needs of our family members to be regarded and loved as part of the process. Every family facing Alzheimer's Disease and related dementia's should have this book on hand for reference. Beverly
Bigtree Murphy, MS, CRC,
Mike
Tribby
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