HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Exercises done while seated in a chair – how hard could that be?
But try pounding your feet up and down on the floor while slapping your thighs for about 30 seconds. Try standing beside that same chair and trying to kick it back to bump your own bum or repeatedly arching your toe out to make a giant circle, like something dreamed up at Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks – it’s not easy, and it’s certainly no laughing matter.
But that doesn't stop the 30 or so members of the Balance and Strength Class at Jackson Way Baptist Church in Huntsville from laughing anyway.
"Can you kick yourself in the booty?" asks the class leader, Dianna Stoner, an R.N. who directs the church's Center of Recreation Evangelism, as they call the health center at the church.
“I sure can’t,” says Don Grider, 78, Stoner’s father and the class clown of the group of senior citizens who are working on the exercises.
“Want me to do it for you?” calls a woman from the back of the gym. Her question starts a ripple of laughter than nearly drowns out Stoner’s rhythmic counting and steady encouragement.
"After we get through, I'm real winded -- but I can really move," says Bob Kimbrough, who's been part of the class since it started in the summer of 2012.
Dianna Stoner leads a Strength and Balance Class at the Center of Recreation Evangelism at Jackson Way Baptist Church, 1001 Andrew Jackson Way in Huntsville, Ala., on Jan. 7, 2013. The CORE at the church is open to the community at free or very minimal cost. Other classes offered at the CORE include regular aerobics and Seniorcize, a low-impact aerobics program offered by Senior Horizons through Huntsville Hospital at the church. Getting congregations involved in offering senior health programs is important to helping people live healthfully at the end of their lives, says Dr. Zaheer Khan, a nationally respected expert in geriatric medicine. (Kay Campbell / kcampbell@al.com)
“She takes no pity on us,” Louise Gipson says of Stoner afterwards. “You don’t get any time to rest.”
But resting is one of the worst things that anyone can do – particularly as they get older, says Dr. Zaheer Khan, founder of the non-profit Center for Aging in Huntsville.
The Center offers free training to church and community recreation leaders in developing classes to help older adults stay active and healthy.
Dianna Stoner, who is also a certified aerobics instructor, worked with Kim Davis, who directs the Center's Balance Studio, to develop the class in balance and the Seniorcize, a low-impact aerobics program, at Jackson Way's CORE facility.
"Falls can be prevented," Khan said. "They are not an inevitable part of aging."
Khan, who describes himself as a “doctor without borders,” has, in fact, worked for that international organization that sends medical help into war-torn and desperate areas.
Khan grew up in India, the son of a Russian man who himself grew up as a homeless orphan who taught himself English by hanging out at the courthouse. Khan, who inherited his father's insatiable intelligence, left India after medical school to work with Kurdish refugees in camps along the Iraq-Turkish border for six years. That was when his father began declining, developed dementia, fell, and entered his final confused and pain-ridden last months.
“I saw him in the hospital – all of them – lying down,” Khan remembered as he talked about what led to his work at the clinic in Huntsville. “The attitude of the doctors was, ‘There is nothing we can do. He has lived his life.’”
Doing nothing doesn’t come naturally to Khan. After all, when he and his first wife had a first baby that died of a rare genetic complication, they moved to England so Khan could get a fellowship in genetics to understand what had happened. After he watched his father’s decline, he took yet another fellowship, this one in geriatrics in England just as the hospice and palliative care began to be clearly defined.
In 1991, they moved to New York. Not only did he and his wife want their children to grow up in the U.S., but there was a mysterious new disease, AIDS, that Khan took yet another fellowship to study.
Dr. Zaheer Khan, at right, talks with George McDonough, 84, the chairman of the board of the non-profit Center for Aging in Huntsville, Ala. (Kay Campbell / kcampbell@al.com)
“I want to learn new things,” Khan said.
Whatever else he studied, Khan felt drawn back to geriatrics, the care of the elderly. He took one more fellowship, this time at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, to gain board certification in the U.S. and, eventually, to become an assistant professor in geriatrics at UAB. From there the family moved to Huntsville in 1996, first with the UAB clinic here, and, since 1998, on his own both at a clinic and in establishing the non-profit Center for Aging. He established the Center for Aging to become a resource for multi-dimensional health care for people who are aging – to change the model of aging from one of inevitable decline to one of vigorous engagement with life until death.
Leaving the university was not about the money, Khan said; it was about expanding what he could do. Khan envisions Huntsville, already one of the country's most popular cities for retirees, becoming a national model of elder care. He has helped oversee the establishment of an ACE Unit, Acute Care for Elders, at Crestwood Hospital, a unit where family members are welcome to stay with their loved ones, and nurses are as likely to offer suggestions to doctors as the other way around.
“If someone is at the side of the bed taking care of someone, they don’t need a baldheaded man like me to come tell them what to do,” Khan said. “Here the people are not coming for a cure; they are coming for care.”
A cornerstone to Khan’s dream is the network and supportive communities that churches and other religious congregations can offer to their members.
“We want to transfer this to the churches because the government cannot do everything,” Khan said.
So the Center reaches out to parish nurses and to other volunteers with free or very inexpensive training and classes. In addition to Jackson Way Baptist Church, leaders at First Baptist Church in Huntsville have also connected with the Center to learn how to give classes to improve balance. The exercise classes provide a gentle workout up and down the body, as well as developing new pathways in the brain to decrease the likelihood of falling.
“There are ‘giants’ of aging,” Khan said, ticking off falls, too much medication, dementia, depression and incontinence. “I’m going after them one by one.”
Preventing falls alone will help forestall the broken bones and loss of confidence falls engender, the narrowing of the circle of a person’s possibilities. With one-third of adults 65 and older suffering a fall every year, and more than $30 billion being spent on care of adults with hip fractures from falls each year, Khan is passionate about convincing elders and those who care for elders to understand that falling can be prevented with a high rate of success through a program of gentle, consistent exercise.
“The role of the church is to support and to help the community,” Khan said. “That’s a greater service to God than just talking from the pulpit. A program created in a church creates a sense of community and helps people live a healthful, graceful life.”
For more ideas of church-based health programs and parish nurses, see this story about a workshop Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013, in Huntsville to introduce those concepts.