Transgender Health, Aging, and Advocacy: A Podcast with Noelle Marie Javier and Jace Flatt
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Release Date: 06/19/2025
The Chaplain and the Doctor: A Podcast with Betty Clark and Jessica Zitter
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In this week’s episode, we delve into the powerful documentary with two extraordinary guests: Betty Clark, the chaplain at the heart of the film, and Dr. Jessica Zitter, the physician and filmmaker who brought this story to the screen. The film provides a deeply moving look into the ways personal stories and biases shape our interactions in healthcare. Through our conversation with Betty and Jessica, I gained a valuable insight: the narratives we carry within ourselves—whether conscious or unconscious—act as invisible forces that influence how we engage with patients and...
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A Strategic Path Forward for Hospice & Palliative Care: Ira Byock, Kristi Newport, Brynn Bowman
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In June of 2025, hospice and palliative care pioneer Ira Byock . In a nutshell, he expressed concerns that the quality of hospice care in the United States has become highly variable, with disturbing frequency of unethical practices and avaricious owners. He also raised concern that the rapid increase in palliative care program growth during the first two decades of this century has stalled, leaving us with understaffed programs that are often inadequately trained. Along with Ira, we’ve invited Kristi Newport, a palliative care doctor and Chief Medical Officer of the , and Brynn...
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Palliative Care in Sickle Cell: Craig Blinderman, Stephanie Kiser, Eberechi Nwogu-Onyemkpa
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Today’s topic on palliative care for sickle cell disease may raise eyebrows with some of you. You might think, wait, now we’re doing sickle cell? On top of , , and ? Where does it end? Do we have staff for all of this? Well I implore you, dear listeners, to keep an open mind and listen to this podcast. Our guests do a fabulous job of stating the case for palliative care in sickle cell disease, to the point that we ask: why haven’t we been doing this all along? Our guests today are Craig Blinderman, Stephanie Kiser, Eberechi Nwogu-Onyemkpa, three palliative...
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Medical Billing and Coding in Geriatrics: Peter Hollmann, Ken Koncilja, and Audrey Chun
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Last month, the “Billing Boys”—Chris Jones and Phil Rodgers—joined the GeriPal podcast to . This month, we’re back with part two, shifting the focus to geriatrics. While billing and coding may not be the most exciting topic, they’re essential for ensuring fair reimbursement for the complex care we provide and for supporting the work of our interprofessional teams, many of whom can’t bill directly for their services. When we underbill or leave money on the table, we not only shortchange ourselves but also devalue the critical role of geriatrics in the healthcare system. This time,...
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Rethinking Slow Codes: Gina Piscitello, Parker Crutchfield, Jason Wasserman
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
I’m going to begin with a wonderful quote from a recent editorial in by our guests Parker Crutchfield & Jason Wasserman. This quote illustrates the tension between the widely held view in bioethics that slow codes are unethical, and the complexity of real world hospital practice: “Decisive moral positions are easy to come by when sitting in the cheap seats of academic journals, but a troubling ambivalence is naturally characteristic of live dilemmas.” Gina Piscitello, our third guest, recently surveyed doctors, nurses and others at 2 academic medical centers about slow codes. ...
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GeriPal Live! at NPCRC Foley Retreat: Dio Kavalieratos, Prasanna Ananth, Alexi Wright
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
This is the second GeriPal podcast we’ve recorded live using this format, see this to our prior podcast at the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) meeting in Philadelphia. Also look for our upcoming podcast recorded live from the . Today we join you from beautiful Banff, Alberta, Canada at the National Palliative Care Research Center () annual Kathleen Foley retreat. This meeting was bittersweet. I’ve been fortunate to attend every meeting in one capacity or another since 2006. The made an enormous impact on the growth and capacity for palliative care...
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GeriPal Live! at CAPC: Karen Bullock, Kim Curseen, Matt Gonzales
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Eric and I had the pleasure of doing a GeriPal Live! Podcast as the closing keynote for the recent in Philadelphia PA. For this podcast, we invited 3 guests to each select an article of interest to them, and engage in a discussion about the article, including questions from the CAPC attendees in the audience. Our guests chose the following articles (in the order discussed) Matt Gonzales used AI to select an article by Ravi Parikh on , published in JAMA Network Open, finding 44% in the intervention arm received palliative care consults, vs 8% in the control arm. We discussed use of AI...
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Pre-Operative Geri Assessment: Vicky Tang and Houman Javedan
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
We love getting requests from listeners for podcast topics. This request came from geriatricians we met at the annual American Geriatrics Society meeting in Chicago. They wanted to know more about what a geriatrician should do in a pre-operative risk assessment. So we invited Vicky Tang and Houman Javedan, two geriatricians and leaders in the pre-operative assessment and prehab space, to talk with us. As is our style, we backed up to some bigger questions, including: -Why do patients need a geriatric assessment pre-operatively?-Why are our surgical colleagues asking...
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What Makes a Good Death? Karen Steinhauser, Rasa Mikelyte, Edison Vidal
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
What is a “good death”? How should we define it, and who gets to decide? Is the concept of a “good death” even useful? Twenty-five years ago, Karen Steinhauser published a groundbreaking study in JAMA that transformed my understanding of what it means to have a good death and questioned the usefulness of the term itself. This study examined the factors that are important at the end of life for patients, families, physicians, and other healthcare providers. In today’s podcast, we are honored to have Karen join us to discuss this pivotal study and the nature of a “good death”. We...
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Medical Billing and Coding with the "Billing Boys"
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
A podcast on medical billing and coding??? Ok, hear us out as we were skeptical too. We’ve invited the Billing Boys, Chris Jones and Phil Rodgers, who convinced us of the following: Billing is complicated, but it isn’t hard. Effectively billing helps pay for the interprofessional team members who often can't bill We should know our worth and bill for it. Just because a visit didn’t feel HARD to a well-trained provider doesn’t mean it wasn’t complex or valuable. Many of us have long suffered from low professional self-esteem when it comes to money, and it’s high...
info_outlineHappy Pride Month GeriPal listeners!
Transgender issues are in the news. Just today (June 17th) as we record this podcast:
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Ezra Klein released a wonderful interview with Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of congress
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A judge ruled that cuts to NIH grants focused on minority groups, including transgender people, were illegal and ordered the government to restore funding.
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It’s Pride month, and our guests remind us of the leadership of two trans women in the Stonewall riots, which started the modern fight for LGBTQI+ rights and liberation.
Today’s guests are Noelle Marie Javier, a geriatrician and palliative care doc who tells her story of transitioning as a faculty member at Mt. Sinai in New York, and Jace Flatt, who started their journey as a gerontology researcher at UCSF and is now faculty at UNLV. Jace was in the news recently for having multiple federal grants cancelled because they included transgender participants. We cover many topics, including:
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Terminology: gender identity, sexual orientation, gender expression, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, what’s in LGBTQI+
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Gender affirming care
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Major health and medical issues associated with aging as a transgender person
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Allostatic load
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Accelerated aging
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What can clinicians do - pointers, pearls, and attitudes
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Dementia risk
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Caregiver issues
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Hormone replacement therapy at the end of life
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Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data, what is it, how to collect it respectfully and safely
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Mentioned: Harvey Chochinov’s Dignity Therapy question, and our prior podcast on LGBT Care for older adults and serious illness with Carey Candrian and Angela Primbas
So pleased to sing True Colors by Cyndi Lauper, with Kai on guitar for those of you listening to the podcast.
-Alex Smith
Many links!
-Rainbows of Aging: Jace Flatt’s research site.
-Callen-Lorde gender affirming trans health services
-GLMA: organization for health professional advancing LGBTQ+ equality
-Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF
-World Professional Association for Transgender Health
-Sage advocacy services for LGBTQ+ Elders: focus on impact of Medicaid cuts
-Trans bodies, Trans selves: resource guide