Stay ConnectedA geriatrics and palliative medicine podcast for every health care professional.
Two UCSF doctors, Eric Widera and Alex Smith, 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.
CME and MOC credit available (AMA PRA Category 1 credits) at www.geripal.org
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As Eric notes in the introduction, this recent study in JAMA by Jeff Williamson and colleagues led to some very contradictory headlines. Some headlines proclaimed that lowering blood pressure prevents dementia, and others stated the opposite, that lowering blood pressure does not prevent dementia. So what exactly did the study show? Do these results apply to patients we commonly see in Geriatrics? What should we make of the fact that after the trial was stopped early the blood pressures in the lower blood pressure target group rose - does this mean you can't achieve intensive blood pressure lowering "in the real world"?
In the 1990s, Susan Tolle helped create the POLST. Now she and Elizabeth Eckstrom want to change it. And personally, I think they're right.
On this week's podcast we have Bridget Sumser, a clinical palliative care social worker, board member for the Advanced Palliative Hospice Social Worker certification exam, and now co-author of a new book "Palliative Care: A Guide for Health Social Workers".
Three reasons you should listen to this podcast: The issue of patients cycling back and forth between the hospital and skilled nursing facilities near the end of life is common, will ring true to those of you who are clinicians, and has largely been ignored in the literature. It's about a hot off the press article published today in the NEJM. Lynn Flint, Palliative care doc at UCSF in the Division of Geriatrics, first author, and our guest, makes me sing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Brittany Spears. This moment is either a new high or a new low for the GeripPal podcast, I can't tell which. You really need to listen to the final seconds when Eric joins in singing, "still believe" in high falsetto.
Geriatrics teaches us that older adults with infections often present with non-specific symptoms rather than typical localizing symptoms of infection present in younger adults. Sometimes they present with fever, delirium, malaise, or fatigue. In today's GeriPal/JAGS joint podcast, Jeff Caterino challenges this common teaching by examining the extent to which non-specific symptoms are predictive of infection for older adults presenting to the emergency department. Turns out - they're not so predictive as you might think!
May Hua's study addresses the still unanswered question - do specialized palliative care consults in the ICU do anything? She looked a number of outcomes comparing ICU patients in hospitals with and without palliative care consults. While most outcomes were similar, rates of hospice use were higher in hospitals with palliative care teams.
On todays Podcast we talk with Marian (Emmy) Betz about firearm safety, including how to counsel individuals with dementia about guns. Emmy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and has written some pretty amazing papers on the subject of firearm safety.
In this week's GeriPal podcast we talk with Tim Girard, Plumonary Critical Care physician-researcher at the University of Pittsburgh about his study NEJM study of Haloperidol vs. Ziprasidone vs. Placebo for ICU delirium in critically ill patients.
On this weeks podcast we are talking with Aanand Naik about his recent JAGS article titled "Development of a Clinically Feasible Process for Identifying Individual Health Priorities".
We thought it would be an excellent time to talk about substance use in older adults as many of us gather around the Thanksgiving dinner table with our extended families. We invited Ben Han, a geriatrician and Assistant Professor of Medicine in Geriatrics at NYU, to talk about the research that he has done in this area. In particular, we talked with Ben about the recent increase in substance use in older adults with the rising baby boomer generation, including use of alcohol, marijuana, heroin and prescription opiate misuse, and other drugs.
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