GeriPal

How do you teach communication in serious illness?  Can you?  Do you teach it the same way to doctors and nurses in training?  What level trainee do you target - medical students, interns, residents?  How do we know our teaching is working?

We discuss these and other bread and butter communication issues with Dr. Wendy Anderson, a palliative care physician at UCSF, director of the Bay Area Hub for Vitaltalk, and leader of IMPACT-ICU, a project to train ICU nurses in communication.  

In this week's podcast we talk with Helen Kales, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan the VA Center for Clinical Management and Research. 

We've spent a great deal of effort in Geriatrics describing what we shouldn't do to address behavioral symptoms in dementia: physical restraints, antipsychotics, sedating antidepressants.  Helen Kales was lecturing around the country about all of these things we shouldn't do a few years back, and people would raise their hands and ask, "Well, what should we do?" She realized she needed to give caregivers tools to help.

On this weeks podcast, we interview Dr. Joan Teno about her recently published study in JAMA titled "Site of Death, Place of Care, and Health Care Transitions Among US Medicare Beneficiaries, 2000-2015."

In 2013, Dr. Teno published a study that showed how good our health care system in the US promotes patient churn. Despite positive signs of more hospice use and decreased deaths in the hospital, Dr. Teno found the from 2000 to 2009 we "churned" patients through more ICU visits, more hospitalizations, and more late transitions that are burdensome to dying persons in their family. Dr. Teno's latest study shows us how we are doing now, extending that work to 2015 and now including Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.

This week we talk with Charlie Wray, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF, about why clinicians should use social media in their professional lives. Charlie is a hospitalist and the Associate Social Media Editor for the Journal of Hospital Medicine. His arguments for using social media are germane to all clinicians, however. "Number Needed to Tweet" is the title of his recent grand rounds on this subject.

The following story is by Jennifer Heidmann, MD, FACP. She is the Medical Director of Redwood Coast PACE in Eureka, CA, as well as a physician for Hospice of Humboldt and a hospitalist at St Joseph Hospital.

In this week's GeriPal podcast we talked with Dr. John Nelson, who has been Medical Director of Hospice of Humboldt for 17 years. Hospice of Humboldt serves the area around Eureka, a mix of town and very rural locations, and has several unique features, including:

by: Alex Smith, @AlexSmithMD

Each July we post something about an introductory topic for the new fellows. See our prior posts on:
How to explain hospiceHow to explain palliative careHow to have a code status conversationHow to talk about imminent death and dyingHow to talk to patients when you first meet them (hint: More like a cab driver, less like a doctor)

In this week's podcast we talked with Dr. Bernard Lo (Bernie as he is known). Dr. Lo is President of the Greenwall Foundation, a foundation dedicated to improving Bioethics research nationally. Prior to Greenwall, Dr. Lo was Professor of Medicine at UCSF and head of the Bioethics Program. He still maintains a primary care practice at UCSF.

For today's GeriPal Podcast we talk with Drs. Nathan Brummel and Lauren Ferrante, both critical care physician-researchers, about integrating geriatrics principles in intensive care units.

Tramadol. Is it just a misunderstood opioid that is finally seeing its well deserved day in the sun, or is it, as our podcast guest David Juurlink put it, what would happen if "codeine and Prozac had a baby, and that baby grew into a sullen, unpredictable teenager who wore only black and sometimes kicked puppies and set fires"?

Well that's what we are going to be discussing today with none other than David Juurlink, an Internist and Clinical Pharmacologist at the University of Toronto who has written about Tramadon’t on both his twitter account and on the blog "Tox and Hound."

David walks us through the top reasons why we should question the rapid uptick in Tramadol prescriptions, including that its metabolism is hugely variable, so giving a dose of Tramadol is like giving venlafaxine and morphine in an unknown ratio. It also is associated with increased risks of hypoglycemia, seizures, serotonin syndrome and all the other usual stuff with opioids (including dep…

On today's episode we talk to Larry Allen and Dan Matlock about decision making around destination therapy. No this has nothing to do with your summer vacation plans. Rather, we talk about how individuals with heart failure decide about whether or not to pursue "destination therapy" with an Left Ventricular Device, or LVAD.