GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast

I always find cachexia in serious illness puzzling. I feel like I recognize it when I see it, but I struggle to give a clear definition or provide effective ways to address it.

In today's podcast, we…

As Eric notes at the end of today’s podcast, we talk about many difficult issues with our patients.  How long they might have to live. Their declining cognitive abilities. What makes their lives mean…

The landscape of options for treating people with kidney failure is shifting.  It used to be that the “only” robust option in the US was dialysis.  You can listen to our prior podcast with Keren Lad…

Who gets to decide on what it means to have a disease? I posed this question a while back in reference to Alzheimer's disease. I’ll save you from reading the article, but the main headline is that c…

On today’s podcast, we’ve invited four hospice and palliative care social media influencers (yes, that’s a thing!), all of whom focus their efforts on educating the general public about living and dy…

As Betty Ferrell says on our podcast today, nurses play an essential role in care of people with serious illness.  Who spends the most time with the patient in the infusion center? Doing home care? H…

Eric asks the question that is on many of our minds - is the future of AI more Skynet from Terminator, in which AI takes over the world and drives humanity to the brink of extinction, or Wall-E, in w…

Ambivalence is a tough concept when it comes to decision-making. On the one hand, when people have ambivalence but haven't explored why they are ambivalent, they are prone to bad, value-incongruent d…

In 1983, a 25 year old Nancy Cruzan was thrown from her car while driving home in Missouri, landing in a water filled ditch. She was resuscitated by EMS, but did not regain higher brain function, and…

One marker of the distance we’ve traveled in palliative care is the blossoming evidence base for the field. Ten years ago we would have been hard pressed to find 3 clinical trial abstracts submitted …

What is frailty? Kate Callahan relates a clear metaphor on today’s podcast.  A frail person is like an origami boat: fine in still water, but can’t withstand a breeze, or waves.  Fundamentally, frail…

Almost a decade ago, our hospice and palliative care team decided to do a “Thickened Liquid Challenge.”  This simple challenge was focused on putting ourselves in the shoes of our patients with dysph…

In the last several years, I’ve seen more and more articles about end-of-life doulas (like this NY Times article from 2021). Despite this, in my 20-year career as a palliative care physician, I have …

Today we celebrate eight years, around 2 million listens, and 300 podcasts! 

Eric and I take questions from you, our listeners, about: why we podcast, our most controversial podcast, which podcast …

In our podcast with palliative care pioneer Susan Block, she identified the psychological/psychiatric aspects of palliative care as the biggest are of need for improvement.  As she said, when you thi…

We've talked about Falls a couple of times on this podcast, most recently with Tom Gill about the STRIDE study and before that with Sarah Szanton about the CAPABLE study.  A takeaway from those podca…

In 1982 Eric Cassell published his landmark essay: On the Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine.  Though his narrow definition of suffering as injured or threatened personhood has been critiq…

Last week we talked about a trial of a nurse and social worker outpatient palliative care intervention published in JAMA.  This week, we talk about the other major palliative care trial of default p…

In a JAMA 2020 systematic review of palliative care for non-cancer serious illness, Kieran Quinn found many positives, as we discussed on our podcast and in our editorial.  He also found gaps, includ…

The CDC’s Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain excludes those undergoing cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care. In doing so, it seems to give the impression that pain …