Geriatric Medicine is obsessed with functional status and disability. Much of the practice of Geriatrics revolves around the prevention or rehabilitation of functional status problems. But what is functional status? Ironically, despite the importance of functional status to Geriatrics, defining what functional status is, or how it should be assessed is not so obvious. In practice, most functional status evaluations focus on assessing whether or not patients can do specific tasks important to day to day life. For example, can you do basic activities of daily living such as take a bath or shower, get dressed, or walk across a room with assistance? Can you do housework, manage your finances, and manage your medicines? But there is increasing interest in more holistic views of functional status. These views focus not just on tasks you can or can't do, but on how well you live despite of functional problems. One of the most interesting of these new ways of thinking about functional