GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast

More and more people are, “doing their own research.”  Self-identified experts and influencers on podcasts (podcasts!) and social media endorse treatments that are potentially harmful and have little…

I read Farah Stockman’s article in the NYT on why attacks on DEI will cost us all, and thought, “Yes, and ‘everyone’ includes harm to our healthcare workforce, our patients, and their families.”

So …

Early in my research career, I was fascinated by the (then) frontier area of palliative care in the emergency department.  I asked emergency medicine clinicians what they thought when a patient who …

Whelp, goodbye folks!  Eric and I have been DOGE’d.

In a somewhat delayed April Fools, Nancy Lundebjerg and Annie Medina-Walpole have taken over podcast host duties this week.

Their purpose is to int…

A pragmatic trial evaluates the effectiveness of a treatment or intervention in “real-world” clinical practice.  Outcomes are typically assessed from available records.  Eligibility in pragmatic tria…

Eric and Alex have featured discussions about complex bioethical concepts around caring for people at the end of life, including voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), and multiple episodes…

As far as we’ve come in the 50 years since Balfour Mount and Sue Britton opened the first palliative care at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec, have we lost something along the way?

In today’s po…

I was very proud to use the word “apotheosis” on today’s podcast.  See if you can pick out the moment.  I say something like, “Palliative care for people experiencing homelessness is, in many ways, t…

Much like deprescribing, we plan to revisit certain high impact and dynamic topics frequently.  Substance use disorder is one of those complex issues in which clinical practice is changing rapidly. …

Trauma is a universal experience, and our approach as health care providers to trauma should be universal as well. That’s my main take-home point after learning from our three guests today when talki…

In today’s podcast we were delighted to be joined by the presenters of the top scientific abstracts for the Annual Assembly of the American Academy of  Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) and the…

Things are changing quickly in the Alzheimer’s space. We now have biomarkers that can reasonably approximate the degree of amyloid build-up in the brain with a simple blood test.  We have two new FDA…

It is a battle royale on this week’s GeriPal podcast. In one corner, weighing in at decades of experience, well known for heavy hits of bedside assessments, strong patient-family relationships, and a…

It’s another deprescribing super special on today's GeriPal Podcast, where we delve into the latest research on deprescribing medications prescribed to older adults. Today, we explore four fascinatin…

Many older adults lose decision-making capacity during serious illnesses, and a significant percentage lack family or friends to assist with decisions. These individuals may become “unrepresented,” m…

We’ve talked a lot before about integrating psychiatry into palliative care (see here and here for two examples). Still, we haven’t talked about integrating palliative care into psychiatry or in th…

Surrogate decision making has some issues.  Surrogates often either don’t know what patients would want, or think they know but are wrong, or make choices that align with their own preferences rather…

We’ve covered stories before.  With Liz Salmi, Anne Kelly, and Preeti Malani we talked about stories written up in the academic literature, such as the JAMA Piece of My Mind series.  We talked with …

Denial. Substance use. Venting. Positive reframing. Humor. Acceptance. All of these are ways we cope with stressful situations. Some we may consider healthy or unhealthy coping strategies, but are th…

Falls are very common among older adults but often go unreported or untreated by healthcare providers. There may be lots of reasons behind this. Patients may feel like falls are just part of normal a…