Get Out the Vote - GeriPal Style

Football season is now over. Baseball season doesn't start until April. Worst of all, the World Curling Championship is still more than a month away. How the heck are you going to support your ongoing need to cheer on the home team? Here is a suggestion – root for Geripal in Medgadgest's Seventh Annual Medical Weblog Awards.

Geripal has been nominated as one of the 5 Best Clinical Sciences Weblogs. The competition is fierce with names like Academic Life in Emergency Medicine, EMCrit blog, Renal Fellow Network, and Resus M.E! Even though I really like all their sites, I think it is time to show them what a community focused on geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care can do when we put our minds to it.

So, lets get out the vote. Click on the award link and take 3 seconds to vote for geripal (really - I swear - all it takes is 3 seconds).

by: Eric Widera

Vote for GeriPal for

Best Clinical Sciences Blog

(Polls close Feb 13, 2011)

Comments

Christian Sinclair, MD said…

Eric and Alex and the rest of the GeriPal crew....congrats on your nomination. I really think this is your year and the year for a HPM related blog to win!!! Pallimed and Medical Futility have both been nominated in the past but did not win. I am dedicated to getting out the vote and will be posting to Pallimed tomorrow. Way to go!!

And the announcements of the winners will be while we are in Vancouver!

February 7, 2011 at 10:21 PM

Eric Widera said…

Thanks Christian. It's remaining a pretty tight race. I think it is time to turn up the throttle.

February 8, 2011 at 10:25 AM

Amy Corcoran MD said…

I voted for GeriPal!

February 8, 2011 at 3:20 PM

Christian Sinclair, MD said…

Here is a little bit of support from our few readers over at Pallimed...

February 8, 2011 at 9:04 PM

Earl Quijada said…

Voted. Great job Eric and Alex. Tight race 27 votes ahead...

February 8, 2011 at 9:14 PM

Anonymous said…

Remember you can vote each and every day, polls are almost closed and the renal guys are neck and neck. Spread the word.

February 10, 2011 at 3:49 PM

Lost in Translation: Google’s Translation of Palliative Care to ‘Do-Nothing Care’

by: Cynthia X. Pan, MD, FACP, AGSF (@Cxpan5X)

My colleagues often ask me: “Why are Chinese patients so resistant to hospice and palliative care?” “Why are they so unrealistic?” “Don’t they understand that death is part of life?” “Is it true that with Chinese patients you cannot discuss advance directives?”

As a Chinese speaking geriatrician and palliative care physician practicing in Flushing, NY, I have cared for countless Chinese patients with serious illnesses or at end of life. Invariably, when Chinese patients or families see me, they ask me if I speak Chinese. When I reply “I do” in Mandarin, the relief and instant trust I see on their faces make my day meaningful and worthwhile.

At my hospital, the patient population is about 30% Asian, with the majority of these being Chinese. Most of these patients require language interpretation. It becomes an interesting challenge and opportunity, as we often need to discuss advance directives, goals of care, and end of life care options…

Delirium: A podcast with Sharon Inouye

In this week's GeriPal podcast we discuss delirium, with a focus on prevention. We are joined by internationally acclaimed delirium researcher Sharon Inouye, MD, MPH. Dr Inouye is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Aging Brain Center in the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife.

Dr. Inouye's research focuses on delirium and functional decline in hospitalized older patients, resulting in more than 200 peer-reviewed original articles to date. She has developed and validated a widely used tool to identify delirium called the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), and she founded the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) to prevent delirium in hospitalized patients.

We are also joined by guest host Lindsey Haddock, MD, a geriatrics fellow at UCSF who asks a great question about how to implement a HELP program, or aspects of the program, in a hospital with limited resources.

You can also find us on Youtube!

Listen to GeriPal Podcasts on:
iTunes…

Are Palliative Care Providers Better Prognosticators? A Podcast with Bob Gramling

Estimating prognosis is hard and clinicians get very little training on how to do it. Maybe that is one of the reasons that clinicians are more likely to be optimistic and tend to overestimate patient survival by a factor of between 3 and 5. The question is, aren't we better as palliative care clinicians than others in estimating prognosis? This is part of our training and we do it daily. We got to be better, right?

Well, on todays podcast we have Bob Gramling from the Holly and Bob Miller Chair of Palliative Medicine at the University of Vermont to talk about his paper in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (JPSM) titled “Palliative Care Clinician Overestimation of Survival in Advanced Cancer: Disparities and Association with End of Life Care”.

Big findings from this JPSM paper include that we, like all other clinicians, are an optimistic bunch and that it actually does impact outcomes. In particular, the people whose survival was overestimated by a palliative care c…

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