Some times people with dementia have issues but can't explain it , so the symptoms come out wrong. Or they just don't understand somethings. I new someone that thought for sure she was having a stroke, her son went during the middle of the night to take her to ER, end all be all, she had her reading glasses on , not her. Prescription glasses. Hope that made sense, in my non professional terms. Lol
My mom was a bit of a hypochondriac and we all knew it, so we just took her complaints of new symptoms with a jaded view.
As far as your mother with dementia? Well, she ca certainly still feel pain and experience illnesses. However, it's unlikely she can voice those feelings in a coherent manner. It's really hard!
Use your best intuition and watch her to see if her 'complaints' jibe with how she acts. Mom would say she'd been vomiting for days, and yet we'd go check her and there was no evidence of that. It got to be a guessing game (and she had no dementia whatsoever).
Therapy for this? I think that would be a complete waste of time.
When my MIL complained of aches, pains, etc. the kids would give her an Ativan and half hour later she'd be fine. I think with dementia, you simply are not processing information from your body to your mind. AND it's scary to not feel well, esp if you are prone to anxiety. I know I am and when I am super anxious, I also don't 'feel well'. A klonipin and some time usually sets what's 'wrong' with me back to 'Oh, shoot, I'm fine'.
I am caring for my mother Ada, who is 84 years old, living in my home with alzheimer's / dementia, anxiety, and mobility problems.
With dementia at play, you do not take the elder to "therapists" of any kind because they have brain damage which cannot be fixed. Instead, you learn all you can about dementia and how to deal with mom and cope with her behavior. If she thinks she's sick constantly, that's agitated/anxious thought patterns which may benefit from a mild calming medication like Ativan.
I suggest you pick up a copy of the book Understanding the Dementia Experience by Jennifer Ghent-Fuller on Amazon so you can learn about dementia. I found it to be a very useful tool.
You do not give a lot of info or details about why you think your parent has hypochondria. If the parent you are asking about is the one in your profile that has dementia it is often difficult to tell what is going on when it comes to dementia. A person can become focused on one thing and that becomes a "problem".
Adding anxiety to that and anything that might have been a little problem can become exaggerated.
Some people get stuck in a "loop" repeating the same thing over and over, the person sitting in a wheelchair by the Nurses station in a Memory Care facility that yells out "help me, help me" all day. They don't need help, it is a phrase they have retained.
I doubt seriously if a therapist will make any lasting headway on a person with dementia.
You state in your profile that your mom has Alzheimer’s disease.
Has your mom always been this way or do you think this behavior is due to her Alzheimer’s disease?
Cognitive therapy will not be effective in a person who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Consider thinking about talking with her doctor about meds to calm her anxiety, since this could be a possible reason for her behavior.
Unless she has a diagnosis of being a hypochondriac, I wouldn’t automatically assume that’s what the problem is.
She may be experiencing ‘real’ symptoms. I remember a time when my mom said to me early on a Saturday morning that she didn’t feel right.
She couldn’t describe to me exactly what was wrong. I told her that I would take her to the emergency room. It turned out to be that her blood pressure was too low.
Mom had high blood pressure in the past and was on BP meds. The hospitalist informed me that Parkinson’s patients tend to run low BP and took her off her BP meds.
I was glad that I took her and I was grateful to the hospitalist because her primary doctor and her neurologist had never warned us about Parkinson’s patients having lower blood pressure.
That a real problem. Whose diagnosis is this and who MADE the diagnosis? I hope not you, as you aren't qualified. If it was a doctor, just let me tell you, as an old retired RN, how often they have been WRONG.
Pain and symptoms are SUBJECTIVE, meaning they are felt and interpreted only by the one in pain. The doctor is the investigator. He uses testing to try to find out what's up. Often the tests show nothing. The author Hilary Mantel is a good example. They told her for years she had nothing. She suffered on through many MDs and was finally convinced they were right--she was nuts. Then went to shrinks. She died early and always in pain, because guess what, it was an awful case of endometiosis. Virtually scarred her insides to death.
All too often people say "You aren't having pain; you need a shrink" and unfortunately some of those people are doctors.
This is something for the POA for this particular person (who clearly is judged incompetent, because if not it wouldn't be your or anyone else's decision or business) to discuss with this person's MD.
You give us no private details, which is fine, but it also leaves us really unable to even make a guess here.
I as a nurse can tell you that I would NEVER be indicating to someone that their pain is not real or could be in their head, and I certainly cannot imagine a good cognitive therapist doing so either. They would refer anyone with pain to an MD or BETTER if they would care to keep licensure. This is MD work, and wow, have I ever seen them be wrong!
Every patient is a mystery. They will tell you what they feel. You need to take it seriously.
I worked for a boss with a similar situation - he started experiencing back pain in the summer, right around 4th of July. Thought he strained his back. Doctors couldn't find anything, but the back pain kept getting worse. Our job thought he was "malingering" - and mind you, this was a man who never, ever went sick from work - and sent him to a psychiatrist, who told him the pain was "all in his head" and told him there was no physical reason he couldn't return to work.
I new someone that thought for sure she was having a stroke, her son went during the middle of the night to take her to ER, end all be all, she had her reading glasses on , not her.
Prescription glasses.
Hope that made sense, in my non professional terms. Lol
As far as your mother with dementia? Well, she ca certainly still feel pain and experience illnesses. However, it's unlikely she can voice those feelings in a coherent manner. It's really hard!
Use your best intuition and watch her to see if her 'complaints' jibe with how she acts. Mom would say she'd been vomiting for days, and yet we'd go check her and there was no evidence of that. It got to be a guessing game (and she had no dementia whatsoever).
Therapy for this? I think that would be a complete waste of time.
When my MIL complained of aches, pains, etc. the kids would give her an Ativan and half hour later she'd be fine. I think with dementia, you simply are not processing information from your body to your mind. AND it's scary to not feel well, esp if you are prone to anxiety. I know I am and when I am super anxious, I also don't 'feel well'. A klonipin and some time usually sets what's 'wrong' with me back to 'Oh, shoot, I'm fine'.
I am caring for my mother Ada, who is 84 years old, living in my home with alzheimer's / dementia, anxiety, and mobility problems.
With dementia at play, you do not take the elder to "therapists" of any kind because they have brain damage which cannot be fixed. Instead, you learn all you can about dementia and how to deal with mom and cope with her behavior. If she thinks she's sick constantly, that's agitated/anxious thought patterns which may benefit from a mild calming medication like Ativan.
I suggest you pick up a copy of the book Understanding the Dementia Experience by Jennifer Ghent-Fuller on Amazon so you can learn about dementia. I found it to be a very useful tool.
Best of luck to you.
If the parent you are asking about is the one in your profile that has dementia it is often difficult to tell what is going on when it comes to dementia.
A person can become focused on one thing and that becomes a "problem".
Adding anxiety to that and anything that might have been a little problem can become exaggerated.
Some people get stuck in a "loop" repeating the same thing over and over, the person sitting in a wheelchair by the Nurses station in a Memory Care facility that yells out "help me, help me" all day. They don't need help, it is a phrase they have retained.
I doubt seriously if a therapist will make any lasting headway on a person with dementia.
Has your mom always been this way or do you think this behavior is due to her Alzheimer’s disease?
Cognitive therapy will not be effective in a person who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Consider thinking about talking with her doctor about meds to calm her anxiety, since this could be a possible reason for her behavior.
Unless she has a diagnosis of being a hypochondriac, I wouldn’t automatically assume that’s what the problem is.
She may be experiencing ‘real’ symptoms. I remember a time when my mom said to me early on a Saturday morning that she didn’t feel right.
She couldn’t describe to me exactly what was wrong. I told her that I would take her to the emergency room. It turned out to be that her blood pressure was too low.
Mom had high blood pressure in the past and was on BP meds. The hospitalist informed me that Parkinson’s patients tend to run low BP and took her off her BP meds.
I was glad that I took her and I was grateful to the hospitalist because her primary doctor and her neurologist had never warned us about Parkinson’s patients having lower blood pressure.
Whose diagnosis is this and who MADE the diagnosis? I hope not you, as you aren't qualified.
If it was a doctor, just let me tell you, as an old retired RN, how often they have been WRONG.
Pain and symptoms are SUBJECTIVE, meaning they are felt and interpreted only by the one in pain. The doctor is the investigator. He uses testing to try to find out what's up. Often the tests show nothing.
The author Hilary Mantel is a good example. They told her for years she had nothing. She suffered on through many MDs and was finally convinced they were right--she was nuts. Then went to shrinks. She died early and always in pain, because guess what, it was an awful case of endometiosis. Virtually scarred her insides to death.
All too often people say "You aren't having pain; you need a shrink" and unfortunately some of those people are doctors.
This is something for the POA for this particular person (who clearly is judged incompetent, because if not it wouldn't be your or anyone else's decision or business) to discuss with this person's MD.
You give us no private details, which is fine, but it also leaves us really unable to even make a guess here.
I as a nurse can tell you that I would NEVER be indicating to someone that their pain is not real or could be in their head, and I certainly cannot imagine a good cognitive therapist doing so either. They would refer anyone with pain to an MD or BETTER if they would care to keep licensure.
This is MD work, and wow, have I ever seen them be wrong!
Every patient is a mystery. They will tell you what they feel. You need to take it seriously.
He was dead by January of pancreatic cancer.