[Verse 1] An elder pours his evening glass, the third since half past four, Early-onset drinkers carry decades of that lore, But late-onset starts with grief or loss, retirement's hollow ache, The thresholds shift at sixty-five — one drink less than you'd take, For aging liver, thinning bone, and balance grown precarious, Mix alcohol with sedatives and outcomes grow nefarious, Falls cascade, cognition frays, the warfarin goes awry, Yet clinicians miss the signs — underrecognition, sly [Chorus] *Vedi, vedi, riconosci il segno* — see and recognize the sign, The thresholds fall, the risks compound along the aging spine, *Regarde bien, l'abus se cache* — look close, abuse conceals, Screen with AUDIT, screen with CAGE, and trust what screening reveals, SBIRT is our instrument — brief, purposeful, precise, *Il vecchio merita la cura* — the elder merits this device [Verse 2] Benzodiazepines, opioids, sedative-hypnotics three, Prescribed for pain or fractured sleep, now grown dependency, Cannabis rising decade-fast among the seventy crowd, Effects on gait and memory spoken barely, seldom loud, Tobacco still its slow taxation on the vascular wall, Prescription misuse — quieter vice, yet louder in the fall, The pharmacist, the chart, the gaze that lingers past the pill — Polypharmacy is prologue to a slip upon the sill [Chorus] *Vedi, vedi, riconosci il segno* — see and recognize the sign, The thresholds fall, the risks compound along the aging spine, *Regarde bien, l'abus se cache* — look close, abuse conceals, Screen with AUDIT, screen with CAGE, and trust what screening reveals, SBIRT is our instrument — brief, purposeful, precise, *Il vecchio merita la cura* — the elder merits this device [Verse 3] In motivational interviewing, roll with the resistance there, Autonomy and ambivalence — the elder's right to weigh and care, Age-specific treatment groups yield outcomes measurably above The mixed-age rooms — cohort kinship is a therapeutic love, Withdrawal risks are clinical: delirium, seizure, grave, Medically supervised detox is the scaffold, not the cave, Involve the family, lucid and discreet, around the table spread — *La famille tient la main* when shame has left its dread [Bridge] Now gambling disorder — rarely charted, seldom named — The elder at the casino screen, the lottery obsessed, unclaimed, Verecund — that old word meaning shame-struck, self-concealing — The gambler hides the losses under verecund concealing, Fixed income spent by Tuesday noon, the debt accrues unseen, Screen for gambling in your intake, fill the gap between [Chorus] *Vedi, vedi, riconosci il segno* — see and recognize the sign, The thresholds fall, the risks compound along the aging spine, *Regarde bien, l'abus se cache* — look close, abuse conceals, Screen with AUDIT, screen with CAGE, and trust what screening reveals, SBIRT is our instrument — brief, purposeful, precise, *Il vecchio merita la cura* — the elder merits this device
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