Introduction Aged patients regularly fail to present in a typical way, and atypical responses to sickness are normal. A patient eliciting confusion might not have a neurologic issue but might have an infection instead. Social and mental components may likewise veil the usual or classic way diseases present in elderly persons. For instance, even though 30 percent of elderly persons aged 85 years and over have dementia, numerous doctors miss the diagnosis (Elsawy and Higgins, 2011). Hence, a progressively organized way to deal with evaluation can be useful. Herein is a personal reflection of the implications of age-related changes in geriatric patients explicating how a nurse practitioner might differentiate between normal behaviors/disorders due to aging and abnormal behaviors/disorders that are not age-related including how functional assessments might help distinguish “normal” from “abnormal”. Main text As Stangor and Walinga (2014) define it, a disorder is a progressing dysfunctional sequence of an idea, feeling, and conduct/behavior that causes noteworthy pain and distress, and that is ostensibly deviant in that individual’s way of life or society. The bio-psycho-social model of diseases is a framework for comprehending a disorder that assumes that a disorder is brought about by biological/organic, psychological/mental, and social variables. The biological component of the bio-psycho-social model addresses the effects on a disorder that originates from the working of the person’s body (Stangor and Walinga, 2014). Especially significant are hereditary/genetic qualities that make a few people more prone to a disorder than others and the impact of neurotransmitters. The psychological segment of the bio-psycho-social model incorporates the effects that originate from the individual mental-cognition domain, for example, patterns of negative reasoning and stress reactions (Stangor and Walinga, 2014). The social part of the bio-psycho-social model dwells on the impacts on a disorder arising from social and cultural factors, for example, financial status, vagrancy, abuse, as well as discrimination (Stangor and Walinga, 2014). This model is ostensibly a basic framework for clinicians to use when distinguishing between normal and abnormal behavior/disorders amongst elderly patients. Dementia and mellow cognitive impairment Although dementia and mellow cognitive impairment are both common observations amongst geriatric patients, even the individuals who do not encounter these conditions may face unnoticeable cognitive changes related to aging. These typical cognitive changes are critical to comprehend because, first, they can influence an aged person’s everyday capacity and, second, they can enable healthcare practitioners to recognize ordinary from illness states (Harada, Natelson Love & Triebel, 2013). Therefore, from a personal and professional point of view, to correctly distinguish between a normal and an abnormal behavior/disorder in a geriatric patient, there is a need to follow the bio-psycho-social framework in evaluating the behavior/disorder. It is not enough to evaluate the patient’s genetic lineage to conclude that they are schizophrenic because it is medically established that there are genetic traits that make an individual susceptible to schizophrenia. As a nur