Aging Well: A Guide for Successful Seniors.

As of this writing, I await the recommendations of Hillary Rodham Clinton and the healthcare reform task force. One would hope that health promotion and self-care will be elevated to a higher level of importance, bringing us closer to the day in which our medical system will be transformed into a heatlhcare system. In the meantime, practitioners and educators can continue to promote health among older clients and students. Their efforts might include recommending one of the three excellent books reviewed in this article.

While these three books on geriatric health promotion and self-care (which is defined by Infoletter [1993] as [I] efforts to improve health, and [2] response to medical concerns encountered every three days by the average person) have much in common, each possesses some unique characteristics. All three target older adults and can serve as useful supplements for healthcare practitioners who consider the promotion of health and the independence of older adults and their family members to be part of their job responsibilities. All three have section on exercise, diet and nutrition, stress management, mental wellness, medication management, injury prevention, preventing and managing chronic disease, advance directives, medical screenings, and immunizations (minimal coverage in Fries's book), financial health (except Mettler and Kemper's book), and longterm care (except for Fries's book).

James Fries begins Aging Well: A Guide for Successful Seniors with a succinct premise: He states that although little can be done about our life expectancy, most of us will live longer than we think and that we have much to think about regarding what we can change--namely, the quality of our remaining years. Fries is perhaps best known for his "compression of morbidity" thesis: The life span is genetically fixed and, therefore, reductions in risk factors simply postpone …