GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast

Think about the last time a patient yelled at you in anger.  How did you react?  The last time this happened to me I immediately went on the defensive despite years of training in serious illness com…

Amber Barnato is an expert in simulation studies.  A health services researcher and palliative care physician, Amber lauds the ability of simulation studies to isolate one variable in a study.  For e…

Sometimes you read a book and get a flash of insight - that “ah ha!” moment - about yourself and the ways you interact with others.  That happened to me when reading “Range: Why Generalists Triumph i…

The Covid epidemic laid bare two major structural issues.  First, Black and Latinx persons experienced much higher rates of mortality than other groups.  Second, as we discussed in last week’s podca…

In April 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) issued a report on how the United States delivers, regulates, finances, and measures the quality of nursing home ca…

Acute Care for Elders (ACE Units) have been around for over a quarter of a century. Randomized trials of ACE units date back to 1996 when Seth Landefeld and colleagues published a study in NEJM showi…

Today’s podcast may be a stretch for our listeners.  Please stick with us.  No matter what your position on medical aid in dying (I’m ambivalent) or abortion (I’m pro-choice), this is a bioethics pod…

From discussing “taking away the keys to the car” for a cognitively impaired older adult to decisions to limit life sustaining treatments at the end of life, conflict and disagreement permeate everyt…

We’ve talked at length on prior podcasts about the failures of aducnumab, Biogen, and the FDA’s decision to approve it.  

But wait, there’s a shiny new anti-amyloid drug, lecanemab!  (No it’s not jus…

Eric and I weren’t sure what to call this podcast  - storytelling and medicine? Narrative medicine?  We discussed it with today’s guests Heather Coats, palliative care NP-scientist, and Thor Ringler,…

What would it take to transform dementia care?  While a lot of hope and money is being put into new monoclonal amyloid antibodies like lecanemab, the evidence is that while they are great in reducing…

Assisted Living Communities (no longer preferable to call them Assisted Living Facilities, as we learned on the podcast) are…what, exactly?  That’s the central question on today’s podcast.  The probl…

Health care professionals are human, and as humans we experience loss both in and out of work.  You’d imagine though that our professional expertise and experiences in helping patients and families c…

Dr. Faith Fitzgerald once quipped that prognostic modeling is the “punctilious quantification of the amorphous.”  She has a point.  Prognosis is inherently uncertain.  As Alex Lee says on our podcast…

When I’m on service these days there is inevitably a moment when a resident says “Patient so-and-so is on X” - and I have absolutely no idea what X is.  Modern subspecialist practice advances at such…

Earlier this year palliative care was the correct response to the following clue on the game show Jeopardy:

From a Latin word for “to cloak”, it’s the type of care given to seriously ill patients to…

Have you had difficulty managing a particular type of cancer pain?  For me it’s radiation induced mucositis/esophagitis.  Janet Abrahm is one of the world’s experts in pain and symptom management for…

Have you ever had that moment when talking to a patient, when you realized that the phrase you just uttered, which you’ve uttered a hundred times before, came out rote and scripted?  Maybe some phras…

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has revolutionized the treatment of valvular heart disease for patients with severe aortic stenosis, a condition that affects one in ten adults older tha…