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A geriatrics and palliative care podcast for every health care professional. We invite the brightest minds in geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care to talk about the topics that you care most about, ranging from recently published research in the field to controversies that keep us up at night. You'll laugh, learn and maybe sing along. Hosted by Eric Widera and Alex Smith. CME available!
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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 they really that easy to categorize? Isn’t it more important to ask whether a particular coping behavior is adaptive or not for a particular person,in a …
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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 aging. Providers may feel a sense of nihilism, that there just isn't anything they can do to decrease the risk of falling. On this week's podcast, we tr…
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Dialysis vs Conservative Management for Older Adults: Manju Kurella Tamura, Susan Wong, & Maria Montez-Rath
47:07
We recently published a podcast on palliative care for kidney failure, focusing on conservative kidney management. Today we’re going to focus upstream on the decision to initiate dialysis vs conservative kidney management. As background, we discuss Manju Kurella Tamura’s landmark NEJM paper that found, contrary to expectations, that function declin…
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In March 2020, we launched our first podcast on COVID-19. Over the past four years, we’ve seen many changes—some positive, some negative. While many of us are eager to move past COVID (myself included), it’s clear that COVID is here to stay. This week, we sit down with infectious disease experts Peter Chin-Hong and Lona Mody to discuss living with …
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Cannabis is complicated. It can mean many things, including a specific type of plant, the chemicals in the plant, synthetic analogs, or products that have these components. The doses of the most widely discussed pharmacologically active ingredients, THC and CBD, vary by product, and the onset and bioavailability vary by how it is delivered. If you …
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When treating heart failure, how do we distinguish between the expanding list of medications recommended for “Guideline Directed Medical Therapy” (GDMT) and what might be considered runaway polypharmacy? In this week’s podcast, we’ll tackle this crucial question, thanks to a fantastic suggestion from GeriPal listener Matthew Shuster, who will join …
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Intentionally Interprofessional Care: DorAnne Donesky, Michelle Milic, Naomi Saks, & Cara Wallace
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In fellowship, one of the leaders at MGH used to quote Balfour Mount as saying, “You say you’ve worked on teams? Show me your scars.” Scars, really? Yes. I’ve been there. You probably have too. On the one hand, I don’t think interprofessional teamwork needs to be scarring. On the other hand, though it goes against my middle-child “can’t we all get …
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Can death be portrayed as beautiful? In this episode, we share the joy of talking with Wendy MacNaughton (artist, author, graphic journalist) and Frank Ostaseski (Buddhist teacher, author, founder of the Metta Institute and Zen Hospice Project) about using drawings and images as tools for creating human connections and processing death and dying. Y…
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If palliative care was a drug, one question we would want to know before prescribing it is what dose we should give. Give too little - it may not work. Give too much, it may cause harm (even if the higher dose had no significant side effects, it would require patients to take a lot of unnecessary additional pills as well as increase the cost.) So, …
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Well-being and resilience are so hot right now. We have an endless supply of CME courses on decreasing burnout through self-care strategies. Well-being committees are popping up at every level of an organization. And C-suites now have chief wellness officers sitting at the table. I must admit, though, sometimes it just feels off… inauthentic, as if…
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In today’s podcast we set the stage with the story of Dax Cowart, who in 1973 was a 25 year old man horribly burned in a freak accident. Two thirds of his body was burned, most of his fingers were amputated, and he lost vision in both eyes. During his 14 month recovery Dax repeatedly demanded that he be allowed to die. The requests were ignored. Af…
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Stump the VitalTalk Communication Experts: A Podcast with Gordon Wood, Holly Yang, Elise Carey
48:06
Serious illness communication is hard. We must often deliver complex medical information that carries heavy emotional weight in pressured settings to individuals with varying cultural backgrounds, values, and beliefs. That’s a hard enough task, given that most of us have never had any communication skills training. It feels nearly impossible if you…
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We’ve talked about Brain Death before with Robert (Bob) Troug and guest-host Liz Dzeng, and in many ways today’s podcast is a follow up to that episode (apologies Bob for mispronouncing your last name on today’s podcast!). Why does this issue keep coming up? Why is it unresolved? Today we put these questions to Winston Chiong, a neurologist and bio…
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Anti-Asian hate incidents rose dramatically during COVID, likely fueled by prominent statements about the “Chinese virus.” VIewed through the wider lens of history, this was just the latest in a long experience of Anti-Asian hate, including the murder of Vincent Chin, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. …
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(We couldn’t resist when Miguel Paniagua proposed this podcast idea and title. And no, you’ll be relieved to hear Eric and I did not imitate the interview style of Zach Galifiniakis). We’ve talked a good deal on this podcast about what happens before death, today we talk about what happens after. Our guest today is Thomas Lynch, a poet and undertak…
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Optimizing Nutrition in Aging: A Podcast with Anna Pleet, Elizabeth Eckstrom, and Emily Johnston
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What is a healthy diet and how much does it really matter that we try to eat one as we age? That’s the topic of this week's podcast with three amazing guests: Anna Pleet, Elizabeth Eckstrom, and Emily Johnston. Emily Johnston is a registered dietitian, nutrition researcher, and Assistant professor at NYU. Anna Pleet is an internal medicine resident…
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We are dusting off our crystal balls today with three amazing guests who have all recently published an article on prognosis over the last couple months: Kara Bischoff, James Deardorff, and Elizabeth Lilley. To start us off we talk with Kara Bischoff about the article she just published in JAMA Network on a re-validation of the Palliative Performan…
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