Are the elderly treated differently in hospitals?

Older people also experience health care discrimination. Physicians are often less aggressive in treating their illnesses than they are with younger patients. Medical schools don't teach much, if anything, about elder care. You almost never see a medical student in a nursing home. And you don't see them taught much about death and dying, either. Moreover, Medicare doesn't cover what a lot of what older people need ?- long-term care. The hospice coverage offered is minimal.

Medications? Forty percent of all prescriptions are written for older people, but many weren't tested on older patients in clinical trials ?- this despite the fact that some drugs act differently in older bodies.

Q. Why aren't they tested on older consumers?

A. The excuse is that it's too complex to study older people because they tend to be taking a lot of different medications and they have diseases. But that's why you should include them in trials. And there are ways to do it. You could study people in smaller clusters.