What's the role of geriatrics and palliative care in the care of individuals with COPD? We talk this week with Anand Iyer, the lead author of this weeks JAMA IM article on this subject. It's a little off from our ongoing COVID topics, but given that his along with his co-authors (Randy Curtis and Diane Meier) JAMA IM piece just got published, we fi…

Many of you listened to our prior podcast with Jim Wright and David Grabowski about COVID in long term and post acute care settings. In this follow up podcast, we talk about the situation in long term and post acute care in Indiana with Kathleen Unroe, Associate Professor at Indiana University, a scientist at the Regenstief Institute, and a PI of O…

We were asked by Sean Morrison, Chair of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, to compose a brief GeriPal video of thanks, support, and gratitude for all of the hard work they are doing in New York. These videos are played every Friday during the Mt. Sinai's Town Hall. Prior g…

The peak hospitalizations and deaths in New York City hit around April 7th. Life though in hospitals in New York though have not returned to normal. What were previously operating rooms, post-hip fracture units, or cardiac cath labs, are now units dedicated to the care of individuals hospitalized with COVID. We talk with two NYU clinicians, Ab Brod…

In today's podcast we talk with Zara Cooper, Rachelle Bernacki, and Ricky Leiter about the state of COVID at the Brigham and Women's hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston. While they have flattened the curve somewhat in Boston, they're still seeing huge numbers of seriously ill Covid patients in Massachusetts. They have 143 out of their …

"It's not about perfection...it's about connection." - Keri BrennerThis week's podcast features a dynamic duo of palliative care psychiatrists, Dr. Keri Brenner from Stanford, and Dr. Dani Chammas from UCSF. Dani was a huge hit as a guest on one of our earliest podcasts talking about "Formulations in Palliative Care."This week, Keri and Dani talk a…

The vast majority of hospice services are delivered in patient's homes or other places of residence like nursing homes. This makes the traditional model of hospice care vulnerable in this coronavirus pandemic, especially in the era of social distancing and limited personal protective equipment (PPE). So how are hospice's responding to the COVID-19 …

Imagine that you are the medical director of a large (>150 bed) nursing home. Two-thirds of the patients in the home now have COVID-19. Seventeen of your patients are dead. The other physicians who previously saw patients in the nursing home are no longer coming to your facility because you have COVID positive patients. You're short on gowns and fa…

In today's podcast we talk with Audrey Chun, Professor in the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Sheila Barton, a social worker in the Geriatrics practice at Mt. Sinai.Mt. Sinai has a HUGE outpatient geriatrics service, with a mean age of 85. We talk with Audrey and Sheila about the challenges they face in overcomi…

In the latest in our series of talking with front line providers in the midst of the COVID pandemic, we talk with Drs. Craig Blinderman, Shunichi Nakagawa, and Ana Berlin of the palliative care service at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. We cover a host of topics, including the urgent need to conduct advance care planning with our outpati…

New York is the current epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US, with over 30,000 confirmed cases as of March 25th. Hospitals and ED's are seeing a surge of patients, and geriatrics and palliative care providers, like Cynthia Pan, are doing their best to meet the needs of these patients and their family members.Today, we talk with Dr. Pan, the…

Many of us with clinical roles are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Today we hear from Dr. Darrell Owens, DNP, MSN, head of palliative care for the University of Washington's Northwest campus, a community hospital in Seattle. The UW Northwest hospital has born the brunt of the COVID epidemic in one of our nation's hardest hit areas.Darrell has s…

You are caring for two adults with COVID-19. One who is a previously healthy 70 year old. One is 55 with multiple medical comorbidities. Both are now requiring mechanical ventilation, but there is only one ventilator left in the hospital and all attempts to transfer the patients to another hospital for care have failed. Which patient would you give…

Covid19 is changing the way we interact with each other (from 6 feet away or via Zoom) the way we care for out patients (increasingly by video or telephone) and for some unfortunate few, the way we die (alone, in a hospital for days, isolated from family and friends). This is the first podcast in a series of podcasts about Covid 19. In this first p…

Project ENABLE is a landmark palliative care intervention. And yet, I will admit (Eric did too) we didn’t really understand what it was. So we interviewed ENABLE founder Dr. Marie Bakitas and ENABLE distinguished protégée Dr. Nick Dionne-Odom to learn more about ENABLE. During the interview, we learned a great deal about ENABLE, how it has evolved,…

"Tell me about the problems you have with your medications." A simple open-ended question that is probably rarely asked, but goes beyond the traditional problems that clinicians worry about, like non-adherence, inappropriate prescribing, and adverse reactions.What do you find when you go deeper? Well we talk with Francesca Nicosia and Mike Steinman…

Home-based palliative care is booming. And with the growth of home-based palliative care come unique struggles and challenges: how can it be financed, what does the ideal team look like (or do you need a team?), retaining clinicians who may feel isolated doing this work, identifying patients who are most likely to benefit.In this week's podcast we …

On this week's podcast we have the honor of talking with David Reuben about health care for older adults and how it's time to think different. It really is a smörgåsbord of topics, ranging from how to think about population health for older adults (and how we as individuals providers can provide at least some level of population health), the UCLA A…

We had fun on this in-studio podcast with Dan Matlock, geriatrician and palliative care clinician researcher at the University of Colorado, and frequent guest and host on GeriPal. We most recently talked with Dan about Left Ventricular Assist Devices and Destination Therapy.Today we talked with Dan about Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators (ICD) and…

In this week’s podcast we talk about food insecurity in older adults with UCSF’s Hilary Seligman, MD. Hilary has done pioneering work in this area. Some of this work was funded by Archstone Foundation (full disclosure: Archstone is a GeriPal funder).Hilary's expertise runs the gamut from federal nutrition programs (including SNAP), food banking and…

Should Geriatric Assessments be part of the routine ontological care for older adults with cancer? On this weeks podcast we attempt to answer this question with national experts in Geriatric Oncology: Dr. Supriya Mohile from the University of Rochester and William Dale from City of Hope, as well as UCSF's Melissa Wong.Lucky for us, they also have a…

You’ve probably heard patients say, “Of course I’m depressed, I’m dying. Wouldn’t you be?” This is a fundamental question - to what extent are depressive symptoms “normal” at the end of life? To what extent are they maladaptive, a fancy word for psychological conditions that have a negative impact on your life.In this week’s GeriPal podcast we talk…

Do opioids improve breathlessness? A simple question that unfortunately doesn't seem to have a simple answer. We get into the nitty-gritty of potential answers to this question with a preeminent researcher in this field, David Currow.David is a Professor of Palliative Medicine at University of Technology Sydney. His research has challenged common p…

In this weeks podcast we talk with Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, general internist, Professor of Medicine and Epi/Biostats at UCSF, and chair of a National Academies of Sciences task force on Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care. See Kirsten's JAMA paper summary here (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2752359), a…

On this weeks podcast we talk to Julie Bynum on the question "Do Nurses Die Differently?" based on her recent publication in JAGS titled "Serious Illness and End-of-Life Treatments for Nurses Compared with the General Population." Julie is a Professor of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine at the University of Michigan, and Geriatric Center Research …

Join us as we welcome Carrie Martz! Carrie Martz was the founder and CEO of the very successful Martz Agency, a full service advertising and public relations firm which began in 1980 and was sold in 2013 to Bob Parsons, founder of Go Daddy. The Martz Agency, under Carrie’s leadership grew to one of the top ten largest agencies in the state as well …

We have had some amazing guests on our Podcast. True luminaries in geriatrics and palliative care. This week we are fortunate to be joined by none other than Mary Tinetti, MD, to talk about her recent JAMA Internal Medicine trial of Patient Priorities Care (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2752365).In this stud…

On this episode, join us as we welcome Wendy Adlerstein, LSW. With over 20 years of experience in working with seniors, Wendy Adlerstein, LSW, First Light Home Care of West Suburban Boston, holds a B.A. from Clark University in Psychology with a concentration in Sociology and Human Services. In addition to her Massachusetts License in Social Work, …

On today's podcast we take a moment to celebrate 100 episodes of the GeriPal podcast. Yes, 100 episodes that have covered everything from cranberry juice for UTIs to medical aid in dying.In this episode, Anne Kelly, Lynn Flint and Ken Convinsky lead us down memory lane, asking Alex and me hard hitting questions about the birth of the podcast, our f…

Nursing homes are a tough place to do palliative care. There is extremely high staff turnover, physicians are often not present except for the occasional monthly visit, many residents die with untreated symptoms usually after multiple hospitalizations and burdensome life-prolonging treatments, and specialty palliative care - well that is nowhere to…

A recent study by Vince Mor published in JAMA Oncology found that veterans with advanced lung cancer treated in Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers with high hospice use were more likely to receive concurrent cancer care and also less likely to receive aggressive care. On top of that, veterans treated at facilities with high levels of hospice use…

Do you remember the scene from the movie The Graduate where Ben's dad says, "One word: Plastics"?Well, I write this blog post from the National Palliative Care Research Center's annual Foley retreat, a who's who of palliative care researchers. The words on everyone's lips: "Lay Health Navigators."This is not to draw equivalency between environmenta…

On this episode of Adventures in Aging, CarolAnn is joined by Robert Borneman. With over 40 years of experience in the jewelry industry, Robert Borneman has received certificates from the Gemological Institute of America in Diamonds, Diamond Grading, Colored Gemstones and Colored Gemstone Grading. Robert is also an author, filmmaker, real estate in…

Before we get into this week's topic, would you please take 1 MINUTE to complete this GeriPal survey! It will really help us out. We swear, only 1 minute! Click the link below to access the survey (or copy and paste in your browser). Thank you! GERIPAL SURVEYhttps://ucsf.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_esS7pUAOgSIbNGZNow on to this week's topic...Ale…

About Janice McQueen Ward: Janice is “easy going” and loves to have casual, yet informative, conversations on sex, beauty, love, fashion, work-life-balance, diets, fitness, nutrition, relationships, and life’s ups and downs. Learn the inside secrets to true beauty! Join her weekly for updates on beauty…inside and out! Support the show Beauty Call P…

Catherine Hanson is a Registered Nurse with a background in critical care who left the hospital bedside to help people interested in actively seeking weight loss and health in their life. She is doing this through coaching clients in habit transformation and nutritional education. Catherine is a Wife and Mother of two children and a fur baby. She e…

What happens in Long Term Acute Care Hospitals, or LTACs (pronounced L-tacs)? I've never been in one. I've sent patients to them - usually patients with long ICU stays, chronically critically ill, with a gastric feeding tube and a trach for ventilator support. For those patients, the goals (usually as articulated by the family) are based on a hope …

Ok, I'll admit it. When I hear the phrase "the biology of aging" I'm mentally preparing myself to only understand about 5% of what the presenter is going to talk about (that's on a good day). While I have words like telomeres, sirtuins, or senolytics memorized for the boards, I've never been able to see how this applies to my clinical practice as i…

Brad Soden has made it his mission to make life easier for those who no longer have the mobility they hope for. Brad is a combat army veteran who drove Bradley tanks during his military service. This experience became his inspiration for increased mobility when his wife Liz became paralyzed years later in an auto accident. His wife was frustrated w…

Joanne Lynn, a geriatrician and palliative care physician who leads Altarum’s work on eldercare, wrote a recent JAGS editorial titled The “Fierce Urgency of Now”: Geriatrics Professionals Speaking up for Older Adult Care in the United States” which is very much a call to action for those who care for older adults. We talk with Joanne about this art…

On this episode of Adventures In Aging, Cat is joined by Bobbi Parker Hall, who has been helping women for over 20 years get in the best shape of their lives and stay that way. Her science based programs are designed and infused with a mind, body, spirit approach for the modern woman that sees herself staying strong, sexy and active well into her l…

You're the attending physician on a teaching service. Your resident says we shouldn't order a CT because CT's are over-used for this condition, and represent overuse, waste, and low-value care. In this case, however, you suspect that's not the resident's real reason. The real reason behind the resident's decision is that they are serial minimizers …

On this weeks podcast, we talk with Krista Harrison about the life of individuals living with moderate dementia, as well as what we know about their caregivers. Krista is is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at UCSF, a social scientist, and something that we learned in this podcast, someone who knows a thing or two about singing …

In this week's podcast we talk with Lew Cohen, MD, about his new book "A Dignified Ending: Taking Control Over How We Die."Eric and I approached reading this book with trepidation. We feared it would be a polemic defending physician aid in dying. It is not. Dr. Cohen does not hide his beliefs and opinions. He also does not shy away from the complex…

In this week's GeriPal podcast we talk with Stacy Fischer, MD and Regina Fink, RN, PhD, both from the University of Colorado, about a lay health navigator intervention to improve advance care planning with Latinos with advanced cancer. The issue of lay health navigators raises several issues that we discuss, including:- What is a lay health navigat…

This week we talk with BJ Miller, hospice and palliative care physician, public speaker, and now author with Shoshana Berger of the book "A Beginner's Guide to the End."As we note on the podcast, BJ is about as close as we get to a celebrity in Hospice and Palliative Care. His TED Talk "What Really Matters at the End of Life" has been viewed more t…

Dr. Vanessa Dean, a naturopathic physician who currently works for Tutera Medical & SottoPelle joins eHealth Radio and the Health News and Hormonal Therapy Channels to talk about hormones and health. Listen to the interview with host Eric Michaels & guest Dr. Vanessa Dean discuss the following: You have been in successful practice for a while, how …

Get ready for an amazing episode, Cat welcomes special guest, Tracey Vlahos, known as The Lady V, empowers women to achieve the thriving business, stylish lifestyle and personal wellness they deserve, all with a greater sense of work-life harmony. Tracey is a respected leader, captivating speaker and results-driven sales executive known for effecti…

Join Cat on another amazing episode of Adventures In Aging Episode, she is joined by two very special guests Janis McQueen Ward and Dr. Sheila Hughes. Our Guests: Janice McQueen, is a native Southerner born and raised in North Carolina. She has been studying and performing since she was a child. Working her way through college as a model and commer…

This weeks podcast is all about the intersection of geriatrics, palliative care, advanced care planning and surgery with our guest Dr. Vicky Tang. Vicky is an assistant professor and researcher here at UCSF. We talk about her local and national efforts focused on this intersection, including:* Her JAMA Surgery article that showed 3 out of 4 older a…