This coming Saturday, October 1, will be celebrated "Yom Kishish".
Some of us are already elderly, some of us will get there in the future, if we deserve it.
As parents, there is almost nothing that is not done for the proper development of our children.
Tests, diagnoses and counseling by professionals are tools that we, as individuals, tend to use, and that the public and private system invests in their development.
No stone will be left unturned to advance our children, who are dearest to us.
On the other hand, as children of aging parents we tend to accept the decree of aging.
Do we invest enough in our parents?
Do we require appropriate services for them?
Are we taking care of them optimally?
Our world is aging at a rapid pace.
In the Western world, in countries that are considered "old" such as Germany and Italy, the proportion of those aged 65 has long crossed the 20% mark, and in Japan it even reaches 25%.
In Israel, which is relatively young with high fertility rates, the proportion of old people is expected to reach about 14% in the coming years.
To be properly prepared, several changes in perception are required - both in the general population and at the institutional level.
An important perceptual change is in the definition of who is old - from what age are you or are you considered old?
Age 65, the age that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck set as the retirement age about 150 years ago, was set at a time when the average life expectancy was about 50 years.
Those who celebrate 65 in our time have about 20 more years of life expected on average, and sometimes even more, much more.
What we have learned in the past, as humans and researchers about aging, does not correspond to modern life.
Medicine, technology and the human spirit help and promote change not only in extending life expectancy, but also in providing a better quality of life along the way.
When we make a change in the definitions and adjust them, we will help the individuals to feel fully empowered, and not as those whose time has passed, and for the various systems to invest in the development of the human resource even in people of this age, and not to exclude them from the world of employment or from services invested in the worlds of medicine.
Another and no less important change is the change in the prevailing age.
The realization that the old man is my future self (if I'm lucky) should be part of our education.
When we embrace and embrace the old man or old woman we will become, we can begin to take care of our future well-being today, both in the health sense by adopting correct life habits, in the financial sense by properly organizing for the future, and in the emotional sense of accepting the aging process with understanding and courage.
Pessimism and lack of investment in relation to the elderly is a widespread social perception.
This concept prevents us from developing services for the elderly at the rate desired for their proportion in the population, investing in the quality of their lives just as we invest in our children, and prevents us from adopting tools that will help us with this.
We must prioritize the development of services and professionals who specialize in aging in its various aspects (also in geriatric medicine, which is very lacking in professionals, but not only in it) on the one hand, and on the other - to raise awareness in the general public of the various treatment options for aging parents, and to give them the opportunity to invest in them as they have invested built for life.
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