I notice when people get a lot older, especially in nursing homes, a majority of them are wheelchair bound. My grandpa had a walker, my dad had a crutch. I’m not really sure of why though. It seems like older people always have canes, walkers or wheel chairs to get around. What goes wrong with your legs that doesn’t inhibit the arms?
In: Biology
In addition to the joint issues that come with bearing our weight throughout our lives, legs are also more vulnerable to circulatory issues due to their distance from the heart. Blood can easily pool in the feet and legs and cause issues if there’s the slightest problem with the veins that have to work against gravity to funnel that blood back up to the heart. Blood clots can become a serious risk, leading to tissue and nerve damage.
Legs bear the weight of the body all the time when you are standing. This weight becomes larger as one grows from heavier. It gets even larger every time you run and land on your foot with the weight of the whole body on your foot one at a time each step.
Arms don’t have to do that. That’s why your legs are stronger than your arms. Do an inverse hand stand and Try “walking” a few steps on your hands. I bet it is not sustainable for most non-athletic persons. Compare that with the fact that walking for miles on a stretch is a normal thing for your feet and legs.
But all that years of beating takes its toll on the muscles of your legs. Especially, it is the knee joint which becomes the victim of the constant usage.
As a result, knees give away and the muscles sag in your legs. However, the requirement to bear the weight of the body has not gone away. This leads to the requirements of wheelchair.
Arms also get weaker in old age. But since you are not carrying anything all the time in your arms, this change is not evident.
The joints in our legs bear our entire weight day after day after day for decades. This can eventually wear down the cartilage in those joints. This is why you commonly hear of the elderly getting hip or knee replacement surgery, but shoulder or elbow replacement aren’t very common.
Your hip joint and your shoulder joint share a lot of similarities, so you’d think they’d wear out in a similar way and at a similar rate.
Your shoulder, however, doesn’t carry the better part of your body weight for hours every day. Your hip joint is way more likely to wear out first.
Also, as you age, your inner ear basically wears out and ruins your sense of balance, making walking dangerous for an elderly person with brittle bones, even if their hip isn’t damaged.
It’s not always that the legs don’t work. Some of those people will have heart or lung problems that limit their ability to tolerate any sort of physical activity including walking.
When it is the legs, it can be a lot of reasons. One is orthopedic as in the joints and bones mentioned by others. People can also have neuropathies affecting their ability to feel their legs and balance, which mostly affect the legs more than the arms because the legs are longer. This can also cause chronic nonhealing wounds of the legs.
Degenerative spine disease is also extremely common and can lead to debilitating back and leg pain and, less commonly, true neurologic weakness in the legs. But often the pain is enough to put someone in a wheelchair, especially the elderly.
Lastly, sometimes people with dementia have impaired mental status to the point that they are not able to walk.
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