Yonder: Parkinson’s spouses, weight-loss surgery, pension participation, and male nurses

[摘要] Parkinson’s spouses. Although research hasconsistently shown that Parkinson’s disease(PD) can have a significant adverse effecton spouses, this has predominantly been inspouses who act as primary caregivers. Thisled an Israeli research team to investigate theexperiences of spouses who do not identifyas primary caregivers.1 They found that theprogressive nature of PD led to a dynamicnature to the participants’ experiences; asthe disease progressed, it intensified in theirexperience. In a similar fashion to the ‘on-off’phenomenon experienced by levodopatreated PD patients, where patients gothrough cycles of fluctuating symptoms,spouses experienced a ‘seesaw’ dynamicwhere the disease took up more (off) or less(on) space in their lives. It was experienced asa dichotomy between absence and presencecompounding the challenge of grieving forlosses that had occurred along the way. Theauthors recommend a need for psychologicaland grief counselling aimed at creating a safespace for spouses to grieve over their ‘nondeath losses’.

[学科分类] 卫生学