A short YouTube conversation led by Robert Whitfield MD highlighting how elderly women living alone face compounded health risks — osteopenia, malnutrition, frailty, and lack of emergency alerting — that can lead to prolonged immobilization after a fall (anecdotally reported as being found 'sitting in their own poop for a week'). The speakers emphasize social factors (widowhood, living alone), environmental contributors, and how delayed discovery and malnutrition sharply worsen surgical prognosis and survival.
Chapters
And I'll give you the real terrible, dirty aspect of this, that every woman listening to this or when you share this, should listen to this. You know how they're. How that happens, Right. So we're going to say they don't listen to you or listen to another person who's more informed or informed about this, you know, to the degree you are. They avoid replacement therapy. They're already osteopenic. That's standard. They may have leaky gut, all sorts of other things. Live in a bad environment, drink out of plastic, just do all the things. Right. Then they fall or. I'm sorry. First their spouse dies. So their. Their husband dies, their primary partner dies. So now they're alone, which is very common because women are alone more than men. Right? Am I making that up? That's correct. Right?
Yeah.
All right. So this is what orthopedic surgeons used to tell me. I used. Because I used to be associate professor of orthopedic surgery, they would tell me, like, hey, Rob, you know how this works, is I'll get a call and they'll have found somebody sitting in their own poop for a week.
Yeah. Because they fell in the kitchen.
Somebody actually went into their home after not seeing them for a week. Not a day, not two days, Literally a week. Because they've fallen. They have no device to alert anybody they've fallen. They don't have their phone on them. They can only scream so loud. They're already typically, as you know as well as I do, malnourished. They're not. They're. They're just frail.
Yeah.
And then now what's your chance of survival? You've been sitting in your own poop with a fracture for a week, and you're malnourished right now you're even. Basically, you have a. You're on a hunger strike, and your body's like, what the hell are you doing? I'm broken and you're not feeding me, and you can't sleep. Like, all the things that are necessary to help a surgeon who, no matter how technically gifted they are, can't overcome malnourishment.
And there's not a whole lot in an IV you can do either at that point to load them up. Right?
