It may start with a nagging cough or slight shortness of breath that you simply dismiss. Over time you might feel increasing fatigue or chest pressure. COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – is a group of breathing disorders. It can include chronic bronchitis, emphysema or other conditions that make it much harder to breathe. No matter which sub-type, COPD often appears gradually over time, and is more common in older people because it results from damage to the lungs over time.

But the good news is: COPD treatments, including therapy, can significantly reduce COPD symptoms. If you have breathing problems, you might already have medication to open up your lungs and airways. Or you might have oxygen to help you breathe easier. But medication and oxygen aren’t the only options.

At Ageility, older adults can take advantage of our COPD therapy. Through a combination of physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy, you can greatly improve your quality of life.

How does COPD therapy work?

COPD is fairly common. Over 16 million Americans have been diagnosed with it. Millions more may have it but haven’t seen a doctor yet. When they do see a doctor, they frequently are prescribed medications to reduce the symptoms.

While medications can be used to help manage symptoms, COPD therapy is important, too – to help maintain strength, improve endurance or activity tolerance, and prevent illnesses related to inactivity. Therapy can help interrupt the cycle of low endurance: When you can’t breathe as easily during activity, you tend to become less active, which results in more fatigue. It can be a quick downward spiral if not addressed quickly.

Besides helping you get your strength and endurance back, COPD therapy can also lower your risk of other complications such as pneumonia. It can help ensure you swallow properly so that you don’t aspirate (breathe in) food or drink by mistake, a common struggle among people with COPD. Aspirating food often leads to pneumonia, which further impairs breathing.

As you lose strength and endurance, you also will find it more difficult to take care of yourself. Activities such as bathing, dressing and taking care of your home – or more fun things like shopping or traveling – cause increased difficulty breathing, as well as fatigue. Through Ageility’s COPD therapy, you will regain or improve the ability to perform your daily activities and be able to live a full, active life.

Our COPD therapy focuses on the following:

• Exercises to strengthen your limbs and breathing muscles. With COPD, your body can’t get the oxygen it needs to function well. Exercises can help increase the flow of oxygen into your body.
• Stretching to open up tight muscles around the chest. This can help you breathe easier.
• Education and training to breathe properly and pace your activities, so that you can do more. For example, if you need help getting in and out of the house, our treatments may help you to manage your activity. Soon you may become more independent and find you can go to appointments and other outings on your own.
• Balance training to help you feel safer. When you have COPD, you get less oxygen to your muscles which can make you feel weak or unsteady. You might worry about falls and as a result limit your activities.
• Assistance with weight loss, since carrying extra weight can make breathing more difficult. Our therapists may collaborate with your physician to help you manage weight.
• A speech therapy evaluation. Speech therapists specialize in proper swallowing which can become more challenging with COPD. With increased shortness of breath, it can become difficult to swallow safely. A speech therapist can test your swallowing, teach you ways to eat and drink safely, and help prevent things such as aspiration pneumonia, which is caused by improper swallowing.
• A holistic approach. COPD is linked to anxiety and depression. Ageility takes a holistic approach to treatment, to help increase relaxation, lower stress, and improve quality of life. We also advocate for our clients, including providing help in getting more appropriate living arrangements. In one example, we helped a client arrange for a first-floor apartment to make it easier to get around outside of her home. We can help you, too, to identify and overcome barriers outside of therapy. At the end of the program, you will have learned exercises you can continue on your own. These exercises will be a part of your new approach to help manage symptoms.

How big is the impact of COPD therapy?

Therapy can significantly improve quality of life for patients with COPD. For example, it can reduce how often you need to be seen for COPD symptoms. For one client, COPD therapy helped reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations from 17 a year to just three a year.

What type of exercises help COPD recovery?

One technique that can assist COPD recover is Pursed Lip Breathing, used to help improve your breathing. Pursed lip breathing can make your breaths slower and more intentional.

1. Sit with your back straight, or find a comfortable place to lie down.
2. Relax your shoulders as much as possible.
3. Inhale through your nose for two seconds. You’ll feel the air move into your abdomen. Try to fill your abdomen with air, not just your lungs.
4. Purse your lips as if you’re blowing on hot food. Breathe out slowly through your lips, taking twice as long to exhale as you took to breathe in.
5. Repeat. Over time, you can increase the inhale and exhale counts from two seconds to four seconds.

How can I find COPD therapy services?

If you have COPD – and are feeling limited by what you can do – contact Ageility at [email protected] to learn how we can help, or search for an Ageility location near you.

It’s happened again. You sneezed and felt a leak down below. You think that maybe you won’t go out to dinner tonight with friends like you planned. Maybe you should stay home because if you go out tonight and laugh too hard, you’ll get that same sensation and feel embarrassed.

In fact, loss of bladder control has been a problem for a while now, and each time it happens—including this time—you swear you’ll call your doctor.

But you’re embarrassed and, like all the other times, you put it off. Maybe if you told your doctor you were asking for a friend, you could find the courage to ask advice on managing urinary incontinence.

If you did, your doctor might say your friend should know a few things: First, she’s not alone. Second, bladder leakage, also called urinary incontinence (UI), is highly manageable and treatable. Third, it’s important to get UI checked out, because it may be caused by an underlying medical condition that can be addressed by your doctor. Last, physical or occupational therapy could help, too.

And one more: There are steps you can take now to start regaining bladder control so you can live life with much less worry and a lot more confidence.

You’re not alone

Bladder leakage is more common than many people think. It occurs in both women and men, but it is more common in women, for whom childbirth and menopause are factors in addition to aging. In independent living and assisted living communities, UI is estimated to occur in 15%–35% of women and men. There are three main types:

• Stress incontinence occurs with physical stress, such as sneezing, coughing, laughing or working out.
• Urge or urgency incontinence occurs when a sudden, strong urge to urinate leads to leakage or not getting to the bathroom in time—a “Gotta go right now!” feeling.
• Mixed incontinence is when both stress and urge types occur.

Although UI is caused by conditions that happen to occur with aging, it should not be considered a normal part of getting older. It’s normal for an older adult to go to the bathroom one or two times during the night, and urgency should be rare. Yet many women don’t report UI to their doctor—only one in four seek care for the problem. That’s why it’s important to know that UI is highly treatable with therapy, such as that provided by Ageility physical or occupational therapists.

What can urinary incontinence therapy do?

In women, the pelvic floor is an interconnected group of muscles supporting the bladder. When it weakens, leakage or incontinence can result. Regular exercise of these muscles—called pelvic floor muscle (PFM) or Kegel exercises—can build muscle strength, endurance and coordination. Physical and occupational therapy treatment combines PFM exercises with modifications and other strategies to provide a well-rounded approach to treating UI. Treatment includes:

• Exercises to strengthen the pelvic muscles
• Monitoring the movement and strength of the pelvic muscles
• Teaching an at-home routine for strengthening the muscles and calming the nervous system
• Environmental modification
• Clothing modification
• Functional activities to increase toileting independence
• Mental strategies

By addressing not just physical strength but other factors, Ageility therapists teach their clients multiple ways to manage and overcome UI for an optimal chance at success.

Why you should talk to your doctor about managing urinary incontinence

Many people who struggle with UI are reluctant to bring it up with their physician. But UI may not be just a sign of weak pelvic floor muscles (or, in the case of some older men, an enlarged prostate). In rare cases, it can also be a sign of an underlying serious medical condition. Still, it is a very good reason to talk to your doctor is if UI is interfering with your daily life.

Until you can consult your doctor, here are some steps you can take to begin regaining control of your bladder and the hold UI has on your life:

• Monitor your UI. Note when it occurs to help recognize patterns you may want to change, such as using the bathroom following meals.
• Change your lifestyle. Even something simple can help, such as going to the bathroom every 2 hours during the day to empty your bladder regardless of the urge to go.
• Get adequate sleep.
• Watch what you eat and drink, especially “bladder irritants” such as caffeine, alcohol and acidic foods.
• Increase your physical activity.
• Get involved in recreational and social activities.

Start taking control—talk to Ageility

Are you (or your friend!) ready to tackle UI and leave the worry behind?
Find an Ageility clinic near you.

Physical therapy for seniors isn’t what it used to be—not at Ageility clinics, anyway. Time was that physical therapy was seen as one way to help older adults bounce back from an accident (such as a fall), injury, surgery, pain or illness. Therapeutic exercise, manual therapy, hot and cold therapy, traction—these and other go-to methods for physical therapy were all about rehabilitation and recovery.

However, as senior Bob Dylan—he will turn 80 in May—once famously sang, the times, they are a-changin’. For today’s older adults, physical therapy also means getting back to the golf course or tennis court, swimming like an Olympian, or running road races.

According to Denise Kelly, founder of Ageility, yesterday’s physical and occupational therapy only took the patient part of the way. “The traditional model was to tell the patient, ‘Do this,'” Denise says. “But we recognized that many people are motivated to take care of themselves and to be as well as possible, which we see in independent living communities.”

Ageility is reinventing rehab for older adults

And so Ageility is reinventing rehab for older adults, offering not just recovery interventions but prevention and fitness training in its clinics. Prevention helps senior living residents avoid falls and other catastrophic events, while fitness training helps older adults stay active as long as possible—even to the point of achieving goals they’ve had all their lives, such as running a marathon.

Denise says the Ageility approach honors the fact that attitudes toward aging are changing and that today’s seniors are redefining what is possible in our later years.

“Retirement doesn’t have to mean sitting on the couch all day, and we know that’s not what people want,” Denise says. “Older people want to be productive. They want to be as fit as they can be.”

Erica Leiva, a rehabilitation director for Ageility based in Florida, agrees. “Many of us who trained in geriatrics were told that older people couldn’t improve, that the goal was just to maintain,” Erica explains. “Ageility helped me see—and brought out in me that hope—that a senior can improve at any age. They want that and they should have it, and we’re committed to working with our residents to make it happen.”

Tennis, anyone? Sports medicine for seniors

What does reinventing physical therapy look like? Simply put, it covers a wider range of services as well as possibilities for the patient. Physical therapy includes prehab (strengthening muscles prior to surgery to optimize recovery after), postsurgical rehab, fall prevention, pain management, and strength and flexibility training—and sports medicine.

Sports medicine for seniors? Yes—because today’s older adults are redefining aging. Ageility sports medicine specialists work with residents who want to be more physically active doing the things they love, like golf, tennis, swimming, or running. Regardless of age, ability, or athletic history, they help everyone achieve their physical potential.

Also making Ageility unique is its hospitality approach. “What makes Ageility different is that we have a hospitality background,” Denise says. That means that in addition to including the very latest evidence-based techniques and equipment, Ageility’s clinics possess a warm familiarity as part of the neighborhood environment.

“Ageility really understands the importance of outpatient therapy in our residents’ lives,” Erica adds. “To me, outpatient therapy is the future of rehabilitation medicine. That’s where all the fine-tuning and the magic happens.”

Not just getting better, but better living for older adults

Ageility offers the full gamut of rehabilitative services—physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech language pathology —but it combines these services with a clients other goals which may include not just getting better but living better. That, Erica, explains, is what makes Ageility unique, for physical therapy and beyond. “We love to give them hope,” she says. “We love to help older adults enjoy a better quality of life. We love to see the difference we get to make in people’s lives.”

Experience PT designed for older adults who want to live better

Does Ageility sound like the solution you need – for yourself or your senior living community?
Find an Ageility clinic or learn more about Ageility partnerships.