A great culture change movement and a rigorously researched, whole new paradigm in understanding cognitive and behavioral disorder together offer a potent, dramatic new approach to addressing elder care and both the prevention of and recovery from cognitive decline, dementia and other neurobehavioral sequelae that particularly affect elders, especially so those residing in a long-term care facility. The culture-change movement embraces the concept of person-centered care (PCC), while the innovative cognitive and behavioral intervention model, referred to as Cognitive Neuroeducation (CNE), fuses a neuroscience-informed base with a human-values orientation, both PCC and CNE rejecting the distorted medical model.
This paper outlines the affinity of the philosophy and objectives of the PCC and CNE paradigms, elucidates the misdirection of the medical model, and suggests that CNE and PCC, in a fully integrated approach, can give a whole new lease on life for the elder, redefining elderhood as a meaningful, rich, and rewarding stage of life, even in physical decline and when living in a long-term care facility.