LIFE IN THE END ZONE

From both an individual and a public health perspective, frailty is one of the most important conditions affecting older people. Along with ...

How often does anyone come up with an idea for improving medical care that does good and saves money at the same time? Not very often. Even ...

Physicians are not known for their communication skills. Despite sessions in medical school and during residency addressing topics such as “...

My mother will turn 88 in a few weeks. According to the definition of successful aging put forward by Rowe and Kahn nearly 16 years ago, sh...

The remembrances of JFK this week focused, understandably, on his great promise and how an assassin’s bullet burst the bubble of optimism an...

The 1.4 million people who live in nursing homes are among the most vulnerable, powerless individuals in American society.  They are old (m...

Teeth matter. Not just to chew food, although that is critically important to older people, who are at greater risk of undernourishment than...

Since the 1990s, physicians and patients have been fighting over futility. The doctors look at a patient who is dying and say that further t...

A fascinating article in this month’s health policy journal  Health Affairs   concludes that by focusing on diseases one at a time—trying to...

When I was a medical resident, I noticed that bad things kept happening to my older patients: many got confused and some fell and maybe even...