A Guide for Taking Medication

Many times a person will be prescribed a drug that does not specify when exactly it should be taken. Although you may have been told how many times to take it, do you know exactly when? For example, if your doctor prescribed you an oral pill to take once a day, when is the best time to take it? Morning? Afternoon? At night before bed? A simple call to your doctor can give you the answer, but recent studies show the answer is not as simple as we may think. It has been found that finding the ideal time frame of when to take a drug can make the drug more effective as well as decrease the chances of unwanted side-effects. Finding this ideal time is known as drug chronotherapy. Drug chronotherapy can greatly help the effectiveness of drugs used for the relief of arthritis which is common in the elderly, as well as the effectiveness of cancer treatments. Below is a helpful guide clarifying the best times to take certain medications that are often prescribed to the elderly.

• Medication for High-Cholesterol: Take this before you go to bed as bad cholesterol levels are highest around midnight.
  
• Medication for High-Blood Pressure: Take this before you go to bed helps normalize blood pressure rhythm for the coming day.
  
• Medication for osteoarthritis: Take four to six hours before the pain reaches its peak. Therefore the medication will kick exactly when needed.
  
• Medication for Heartburn: If your heartburn is the worst during the nighttime it is best to take your medication thirty minutes before your evening meal.
  
• Medication for Arthritis: Take at night, generally before bed, this will help with pain the next day.

These helpful guidelines will surely make sure you get the most out of your medication. However, before making any changes it is important to contact your doctor and pharmacist and confirm it with them first.

Be HIPAA Safe and Shred Your Medical Documents | Beach Terrace Care Center

 Medical documents, bank statements, credit cards and papers with personal and revealing information tend to pile up and fall under the radar. Letting one of these crucial pieces of personal information slip away into unknown hands has potential for extreme danger. When your private information gets into the wrong hands it usually leads to identity theft, money loss, and lots of stress. With such strict HIPAA laws, it can even be illegal to not properly dispose of medical documents.

Although nowadays much identity theft comes from information that is stored digitally, there is still a great possibility of your information been stolen from physical papers and documents. So what can you do to make sure your private documents don’t end up in the wrong hands? Shred them! Shredding your documents systematically and routinely can clear the anxiety of losing personal information to the likes of identity thieves. This is something Beach Terrace Care Center takes very seriously.

Make it a habit to shred all of your excess and leftover documents every one or two months, depending on how much paper you accumulate of course. If you do not have access to a shredder many office-supply stores have a secure and reliable way to shred your documents, and some companies will even send a shredding truck to your home. In terms of digitally stored information, backing up the data on a hard drive and removing the obsolete waste is also a preventive measure. Shredding companies will also deal with your hard drives as well. Make shredding all your health documents a habit to ensure your private information is read by your eyes only!  ​

Why Sleep is Especially Important for Senior Citizens | Beach Terrace Care Center

No matter how old you are it has been proven that a good night’s sleep is an essential aspect of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. For senior citizens especially, getting a good night’s sleep is crucial to one’s physical and emotional health and stability, for several reasons.

Senior citizens who get a good night’s sleep, on a regular basis, are more focused, have better memory formation, and less overall memory related problems. The reason for this is because while sleeping, one’s body is able to repair any cell damage which happened that day. Sleep also helps improve one’s immune system to help prevent diseases.

Additionally, senior citizens who get a good night’s sleep, are less likely to suffer from depression, and are less tired over the course of the day. While sleeping well, senior citizens also tend to experience fewer nighttime falls, are less sensitive to pain, use fewer prescription or over the counter sleep medications, and are less likely to suffer from life threatening diseases such as cardiovascular diseases. In fact, women are even less likely to suffer from breast cancer.

For these reasons, Beach Terrace Care Center takes sleeping well at night very seriously. The care center trains its staff to take special precautions during night time hours to keep noise to an absolute minimum. Who knew getting a good night’s sleep could have such tremendous advantages for senior citizens!