GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast

A podcast on medical billing and coding??? Ok, hear us out as we were skeptical too. We’ve invited the Billing Boys, Chris Jones and Phil Rodgers, who convinced us of the following:

1. Billing is comp…

On today’s podcast, we talk about an innovative specialized primary care model for older veterans called the Geriatric Patient Aligned Care Team (GeriPACT) program.  It’s designed with smaller patien…

With all the attention focused on Alzheimer's biomarkers and amyloid antibodies, it’s easy to forget that comprehensive dementia care is more than blood draws and infusions. On today’s podcast, we bu…

In today’s podcast we talk with Eric Wong, geriatrician-researcher from Toronto, and Thiago Silva, geriatrician-researcher from Brazil, about the comprehensive geriatrics assessment.  We spend the fi…

On a prior podcast we talked with Todd Semla and Mike Steinman about the update to the AGS Beers Criteria of potentially inappropriate medications in older adults (Todd and Mike co-chair the AGS Be…

Health care trainees rotate through a variety of different settings. ICUs, hospital wards, and outpatient clinics. If they're lucky, they might even spend time in a nursing home. But on today’s podca…

In his book, “Why We Revolt,” Victor Montori decries the industrialization of healthcare.  We’ve become a healthcare factory, beholden to health systems motivated by profit. In particular, he laments…

Most health care providers understand the importance of goals-of-care conversations in aligning treatment plans with patients’ goals, especially for those with serious medical problems. And yet, thes…

What is death anxiety?  We spend the first 15 minutes of the podcast addressing this question.  And maybe this was unfair to our guests, the fabulous dynamic duo of palliative psychiatrists Dani Cham…

What’s the ideal blood pressure target for older adults with hypertension? Should we aim for a systolic BP of 120 mmHg in all older adults, as suggested by the SPRINT trial? Or should we be more flex…

In this week’s episode, we dig into two deceptively simple questions: When does someone become a cancer survivor, and should palliative care be in the business of caring for them? Spoiler: It’s more …

June Lunney famously characterized the end of life functional course of people with dementia as a slow dwindle over time. Tom Gill later found that people with dementia do indeed have persistent seve…

Happy Pride Month GeriPal listeners!

Transgender issues are in the news. Just today (June 17th) as we record this podcast:

• Ezra Klein released a wonderful interview with Sarah McBride, the first op…

If you’re anything like me, you might find the process of what happens to patients when they visit a radiation oncologist somewhat mysterious. During my training, I didn’t receive much education abou…

The need for better palliative care in nursing homes is significant. Consider this: the majority of the 1.4 million adults residing in U.S. nursing homes grapple with serious illnesses, and roughly h…

Have any of you watched the movie “The Notebook”?  At the end, one of the characters, who has dementia, experiences an episode of lucidity.  When I watched it, between tears (I’m a complete softie) I…

As you know, dear listeners, I love music. We start each podcast with a song in part to shift the frame, taking people out of their academic selves and into a more informal conversation.

Well, today’…

Our main focus today was on nudging critical care clinicians to consider a more palliative approach to care.  Our guests are all trained in critical care: Kate Courtright, Scott Halpern, and Jaspal …

We’ve covered psychedelics on the podcast before—first in 2019 with Ira Byock, where we explored their potential role in medicine, and then again in 2023 with Stacy Fischer, Brian Anderson, and Theor…

Peter Selwyn, one of today’s guests, has been caring for people living with HIV for over 40 years.  In that time, care of people with HIV has changed dramatically.  Initially, there was no treatment,…