The Roots of Palliative Care: Michael Kearney, Sue Britton, and Justin Sanders
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Release Date: 03/13/2025
Do Dementia Care Management Programs Work? A Podcast with David Reuben and Greg Sachs
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
With all the attention focused on Alzheimer's biomarkers and amyloid antibodies, it’s easy to forget that comprehensive dementia care is more than blood draws and infusions. On today’s podcast, we buck this trend and dive into the complexities and challenges of comprehensive dementia care with the authors of two pivotal articles recently published in JAMA. We’ve invited David Reuben and Greg Sachs to talk about their two respective trials, published in JAMA — and — aimed at improving the evidence for care models supporting individuals diagnosed with dementia. D-CARE tested the...
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Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment: Benefits, Cost-Effectiveness, and Who It Helps Most - Eric Wong and Thiago Silva
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In today’s podcast we talk with Eric Wong, geriatrician-researcher from Toronto, and Thiago Silva, geriatrician-researcher from Brazil, about the comprehensive geriatrics assessment. We spend the first 30 minutes (at least) discussing what, exactly is the comprehensive geriatric assessment, including: What domains of assessment are essential/mandatory components of the comprehensive geriatrics assessment? Who performs it? Is a multidisciplinary team required? Can a geriatrician perform it alone? Can non-geriatricians perform it? Who is the comprehensive geriatrics assessment for?...
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What instead? Alternatives to Beers: Todd Semla and Mike Steinman
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
On a we talked with Todd Semla and Mike Steinman about the update to the of potentially inappropriate medications in older adults (Todd and Mike co-chair the AGS Beers Criteria Panel). One of the questions that came up was - well if we should probably think twice or avoid that medication, what should we do instead? Today we talk with Todd and Mike about their new recommendations of , and also presented at the 2025 AGS conference in Chicago (and available ). We had a lot of fun at the start of the podcast talking about the appropriate analogy for how clinicians should use the AGS Beers...
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Art Museum-Based Medical Education: Amy Klein, Laura Morrison, and Gordon Wood
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Health care trainees rotate through a variety of different settings. ICUs, hospital wards, and outpatient clinics. If they're lucky, they might even spend time in a nursing home. But on today’s podcast, we’re adding one more setting to that list: your local art museum. In this thought-provoking episode, we explore how art museum teaching is being integrated into the education of medical professionals—and why it's making a profound difference. Our guests, , , and , share their journey of integrating art into medical training, along with practical strategies you can use if you're inspired...
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We Need a Care Revolution: Victor Montori
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In his book, “,” Victor Montori decries the industrialization of healthcare. We’ve become a healthcare factory, beholden to health systems motivated by profit. In particular, he laments the loss of the “care” aspect of healthcare. Clinicians are under the clock to churn through patients. Patients are tasked with doing work outside of the clinic. Patients are tasked with hours and hours of work to self manage, obtain and manage medications, track weights and fingersticks, not to mention scheduling visits and waiting around for the visit to start. Now we have an app for...
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System Wide Goals of Care Implementation: A Podcast with Ira Byock, Chris Dale, and Matt Gonzales
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Most health care providers understand the importance of goals-of-care conversations in aligning treatment plans with patients’ goals, especially for those with serious medical problems. And yet, these discussions often either don't happen or at least don't get documented. How can we do better? In today’s podcast, we sit down with Ira Byock, Chris Dale, and Matthew Gonzales to discuss a multi-year healthcare system-wide goals of care implementation project within the Providence Health Care System. Spanning 51 hospitals, this initiative was recently described in NEJM Catalyst, showing truly...
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Death Anxiety: Dani Chammas & Keri Brenner
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
What is death anxiety? We spend the first 15 minutes of the podcast addressing this question. And maybe this was unfair to our guests, the fabulous dynamic duo of palliative psychiatrists Dani Chammas and Keri Brenner (listen to their prior podcasts on and the ). After all, we invited them on to our podcast to discuss death anxiety, then Eric and I immediately questioned if death anxiety was the best term for what we want to discuss! Several key points stood out to me from this podcast, your key points may differ: The “anxiety” in “death anxiety” is not a...
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Individualizing Blood Pressure Goals in Older Adults: A Podcast with Mitra Jamshidian, Simon Ascher and Mark Supiano
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
What’s the ideal blood pressure target for older adults with hypertension? Should we aim for a systolic BP of 120 mmHg in all older adults, as suggested by the ? Or should we be more flexible—especially for those who are frail or among the oldest old? This week on the GeriPal Podcast, we explore the nuances of managing blood pressure in older adults with our guests Dr. Mark Supiano, Dr. Mitra Jamshidian, and Dr. Simon Ascher. Now, some of our astute GeriPal listeners may say, “wait, didn't you already talk about this with Mark Supiano in a 2017 podcast titled ” Yes, we sure...
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Should Palliative Care be in the Survivorship Business? A Podcast with Laura Petrillo, Laura Shoemaker
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In this week’s episode, we dig into two deceptively simple questions: When does someone become a cancer survivor, and should palliative care be in the business of caring for them? Spoiler: It’s more complicated than it seems. We’ve invited two palliative care doctors to talk about survivorship with us: , a physician-researcher at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and , an outpatient palliative care doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. This episode is a must-listen for those navigating the evolving landscape of cancer care, and asking not just how we treat cancer, but how we...
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Health and Wealth Shocks: Lauren Hunt, Rebecca Rodin, Tsai-Chin Cho
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
famously characterized the end of life functional course of people with dementia as a slow dwindle over time. later found that people with dementia do indeed have persistent severe disability throughout the last year of their lives. But from our clinical work, many of us are familiar with people with dementia who experience sudden shocks to their health, think hip fracture, think hospitalization for pneumonia. Those disruptive events or shocks often portend a major decline in function from which people with dementia never fully recover. And they’re often a sign of (or cause...
info_outlineAs far as we’ve come in the 50 years since Balfour Mount and Sue Britton opened the first palliative care at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec, have we lost something along the way?
In today’s podcast we welcome some of the early pioneers in palliative care to talk about the roots of palliative care. Sue Britton was the first nurse hired on that palliative care unit. Michael Kearney on a transformational meeting in Cicely Saunders’s office, with Balfour Mount at her side and a glass of sherry. Justin Sanders wants to be sure the newer generations of palliative care clinicians understand the early principles and problems that animated the founders of hospice and palliative care, including:
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Origins of the word “palliative” - it’s not what I thought! Yes, it means “to cloak,” but there’s more…
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Whole-person-care
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Healing as a process distinct from the deterioration of the body
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The patient and family as the unit of care
Our guests referenced many articles on this podcast, linked above and below. If you read just one, read Palliative Medicine - Just Another Specialty? by Kearney. I promise it’s short. 2 pages. Here’s a taste:
…While there is an abusive and useless dimension to illness, pain and suffering which needs to be removed if at all possible, there is also potential in such experience…If we in palliative medicine fail to accept this view, a view which allows that there may also be a potential in the suffering of the dying process, if we sell out completely to the literalism of the medical model with its view that such suffering is only a problem, we will be in danger of following a pattern which could significantly limit our scope for development and lead to our becoming ’symptomatologists’, within just another specialty.
And love that Jim Croce choice. What’s in a name? I’ve got a name.
Enjoy!
-Alex Smith
Links
- Link to the McGill National Grand Rounds Series on Palliative Care, Michael Kearney as initial presenter, and registration for future events. No, you don’t need to be Canadian. Canadians are welcoming.
- Palliative Medicine - Just Another Specialty? In Palliative Medicine By Kearney
- Joe Wood’s book on Total Pain
- Balfour Mount’s memoir Ten Thousand Crossroads paper on Healing Connections in JPSM and Healing and Palliative Care in Palliative Medicine
- Cicely Saunders: A Life and Legacy, by David Clark
- Self-Care of Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life, by Michael Kearney and colleagues in JAMA Perspectives on Care at the Close of Life series
- Twycross on Readdressing Balance in Hospice