Therapeutic nihilism is inadequate in geriatric medicine

Nurses are essential in patient care, upholding the ethical principles of their profession and effectively navigating ethical dilemmas. Neglecting ethical issues can lead to inadequate patient care, compromised therapeutic relationships, and moral distress among healthcare workers.
Ethical Concerns in Healthcare:

Elderly individuals encompass a diverse population with varying degrees of age-related physiological changes. Defining the elderly presents challenges, as the geriatric population is often arbitrarily categorized as individuals older than 65. However, many individuals in this group lead active and healthy lives, with an increasing number surpassing 85 years and falling into the older elderly category. Physiological changes associated with aging impact performance capacity and homeostatic...

In geriatric patients, renal physiology undergoes significant changes, including diminished renal blood flow and a lower glomerular filtration rate (GFR), leading to alterations in medication clearance. Drugs such as aminoglycoside antibiotics, lithium, and digoxin, which rely on glomerular filtration for removal from the body, particularly impact pharmacokinetics. These drugs tend to have slower clearance rates in older adults, necessitating careful dosage considerations.Evaluation of renal...

Age-related pharmacokinetic changes are extensively documented, but understanding age-related pharmacodynamic alterations is relatively limited. This knowledge gap can be partly attributed to the complexity of developing appropriate measures of drug responses compared to bioanalytical methods for determining drug concentrations.Most information regarding age-related differences in human pharmacodynamics originates from cross-sectional studies. However, these studies assume that observed mean...