The College Perspective by Lindsey

As a college student, I don’t often find myself thinking about the elderly or issues in nursing homes, but a recent article in the New York Times has brought to my attention the issues between dementia patients and the use of feeding tubes and I wondered why more people don’t know about this seemingly prevalent issue in America’s nursing homes. According to recent studies, the use of feeding tubes with dementia patients has gone down dramatically in the past few years; from twelve percent in the early 2000s to less than six percent in the past few years. All of this new research has essentially brought to light the fact that feeding tubes can actually be detrimental to dementia patients, aggravating the eating and swallowing problems these patients develop as their condition worsens. Many dementia patients are also so far gone in terms of memory that the insertion of a tube can be frightening to them, potentially causing them to try and rip out the tube, injuring themselves in other ways. Many tubes can become blocked or moved, which requires hospitalization, or the tube encourages the patient to lie still more than usual, leading to bedsores or ulcers. Among all the obvious physical disadvantages, studies also mentioned the social interaction that comes with hand feeding that you don’t really get with tube feeding which can be very helpful to patients as they struggle to remember anything about their lives. With all of this new evidence however, there are still many nursing homes that don’t choose to provide the option of not having a feeding tube to the patients and their caregivers, and sometimes families request the feeding tube option, so it’s not clear whether or not going without a feeding tube will become the more popular or only option in nursing homes in the future.

This article started with a seemingly regular sentence, using an anecdote as a tool to bring the reader in to read more by making a simple statement that is vague but also semi specific enough to awaken the reader’s curiosity but not give the whole story away. From how the story is designed, it seems like the author was trying to cater to an audience of people who identify themselves as caregivers to dementia patients or just the general public who want general information on the health care system. The author heavily relies on support of eliminating feeding tubes from nursing home care, and has little evidence on the effectiveness of keeping these devices. Most information that was for feeding tubes staying in these care facilities was arranged towards the end after a long argument had been made for the elimination of these same devices. I think this story as a whole is very newsworthy as many people don’t consider the specifics of dementia patient care in nursing homes until one of their loved ones has this condition, so providing this information to the general public could help educate caregivers a little more before just believing the doctor is always right.