#geriatrician

Dr. Louise Aronson says the U.S. doesn't have nearly enough geriatricians — physicians devoted to the health and care of older people: "There may be maybe six or seven thousand geriatricians," she says. "Compare that to the membership of the pediatric society, which is about 70,000."

Aronson is a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She notes that older adults make up a much larger percentage of hospital stays than their pediatric counterparts. The result, she says, is that many geriatricians wind up focusing on "the oldest and the frailest" — rather than concentrating on healthy aging.

Aronson sees geriatrics as a specialty that should adapt and change with each patient. "My youngest patient has been 60 and my oldest 111, so we're really talking a half-century there," she says. "I need to be a different sort of doctor for people at different ages and phases of old age."

She writes about changing approaches to elder health care and end-of-life care in her new book, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life.

Dr Nilakshi Weerasinghe is a FRACP qualified Geriatrician & Consultant Physician with expertise in dementia frailty & complex medical conditions in the elderly.

If you are looking after an aging loved one, have you considered taking them to see a geriatrician rather than a primary care doctor? Visiting Angels Gadsden discusses geriatricians in more detail.