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Health Promotion and Aging: Practical Applications for Health Professionals, 3d Edition/Public Health and Aging: An Introduction to Maximizing Function and Well-Being

Posted on: Friday, 30 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Kane, Rosalie A

Health Promotion and Aging: Practical Applications for Health Professionals, 3d edition By David Habcr, Springer, 2003, 483 pp., $59.95 (cloth).

Public Health and Aging: An Introduction to Maximizing Function and Well-Being By Steven M. Albert, Springer, 2004, 287 pp., $46.95 (cloth).

If readers of this issue of Generations wish to further explore public health topics beyond the daily barrage of information (and misinformation and partial information) in the popular press and advertising releases, they will find a huge amount of material in book form. But if they want to explore public health issues specifically related to aging, the pickings will be much slimmer. Health promotion and preventive activities often require investments made early in the life course for later payoffs. Information about public health programs for older people quickly bleeds into the general topic of major public funding programs that promote the health and well-being of older people. For that reason, the two recently published books reviewed here are welcome resources for those who want to concentrate their minds on public health and aging. The two books are very different from each other, and complementary. Health Promotion and Aging: Practical Applications for Health Professionals, by David Haber, deals with health promotion and prevention; Public Health and Aging: An Introduction to Maximizing Function and Well-Being, by Steven Albert, deals with the epidemiology of aging and the hard questions about markers for physical, emotional, and social well-being among the old. I have discussed both books along with others in a much longer essay (Kane, 2005). Below are the highlights.

David Haber is an expert on his topic, and his book is now in its third edition. Always keyed to the research literature, the author his added hundreds of citations to material written in the past five years. When the scientific information is inconclusive, Haber declines to provide advice, thus giving the reader a sense of the inevitable dynamism of recommendations for health promotion. No doubt, fourth and fifth editions will also be needed for such a venture, because specific content rapidly becomes outdated.

As the subtitle promises, the book is practical. It is full of checklists, assessment protocols, tools, illustrations, and resource lists. Each chapter ends with provocative discussion questions. Habcr includes key topics related to prevention for older people, including diet, exercise, smoking cessation, fall prevention, health screening, and alternative and complementary medicine. It is clear that the author has first-hand experience with efforts to change health behavior, and the conclusions he presents are drawn from that experience. He offers thoughtful guidance on how to set goals at a level where the older person can experience some success and on how to set up programmatic and environmental circumstance to further personal commitment and make success easier. When Haber presents "ten tips for changing health behavior," his rules carry conviction. Moreover, he amplifies them with concrete examples. Haber convincingly makes the point that health behavior is not easily changed, and perusal of his book will be an antidote for those planning quick fixes through senior center programming and educational otters. On the other hand, he does provide some tested approaches for the program that wants to be measured by results rather than offerings alone.

Haber's book is readable and lively, and he uses humor to enhance his points. Practitioners would do well to keep this book on their shelves. It is replete with program ideas that could be undertaken in collaboration with public health and healthcare personnel. Furthermore, these readers may find themselves taking a peek to draw conclusions about their own health prospects and those of family members, and they may become diverted with their own struggles over lipids or estrogenic or cholesterol-lowering medications. The upshot of such personalization may be a salutary recognition of the difficulties inherent in applying public health data to shape individual action.

Public health also concerns itself with the health of populations and with the prevention and early identification and treatment of disease in populations. Steven Albert, a quantitative anthropologist and presently a faculty member at Columbia University School of Public Health, imaginatively, creatively, and with extensive scholarship, explores the health and well-being of older people as a population. In his book, he does not deal with public health delivery programs per se, but he discusses the relationship between clinical geriatrics and public health in his initial chapter. The ensuing chapters will reward the reader with rich material on the demography of aging (Chapter 3), mortality (Chapter 4), and morbidity or disability in old age (Chapter 5). Chapter 5 is particularly helpful in its identification of the varying ways that the World Health Organization has defined disability and illustrates the implications of each for a research and policy agenda. Chapters 6 and 7 look in detail at cognitive impairment and at affective function, respectively, as population problems; affective function is broadened beyond mental illness to include neglect, abuse, and social isolation as public health problems. The most unique and noteworthy feature of the Albert book is its articulation of desired outcomes to include successful aging and a good quality of life, a subject surfaced in the much cited book by John Rowe and Robert Kahn (1987), which made "successful aging" a catchphrase in modern gerontology. Many critics have suggested that the Rowe and Kahn criteria for success rule out too many people and fail to envisage a way that successful aging could occur despite disease-related disability. Albert takes up the challenge of trying to make good quality of life operational and considering how it good be promoted by public policy as a matter of public health. This book is more difficult reading for the uninitiated than Habeas is, but those who do read it will find an excellent introduction to life tables, statistics on morbidity and mortality, and epidemiological tools.

Both Haber and Albert have combined the sensibilities of a gerontologist with approaches bom in public health. Neither author's book, individually or in combination with the other, provides a complete textbook on public health and aging, but the books do provide something more than mere encyclopedic compilation. They both offer a point of view and a glimpse into how the public health field can inform the work of aging services practitioners and educators. I hope to see more volumes in the future that bridge public health and gerontology in various ways.

REFERENCES

Kane, R. A. 2005. "Connecting the Dots: Public Health, Health Care, Health Policy, and Successful Aging." (Book review essay.) Gerontologist, 45(2): 274-9.

Rowe, J. W., and Kahn, R. L. 1987. Successful Aging: The MacArthur Foundation Study. New York: Pantheon.

Rosalie A. Kane, D.S.W., is professor, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Copyright American Society on Aging Summer 2005

Source: Generations

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