Episode Guest: Dr. Louise Aronson, MD, MFA, a Harvard-trained physician, geriatrician, educator, and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco
Episode Description:
Physician and award-winning author Dr. Louise Aronson, a noted Harvard- trained geriatrician, will discuss her book, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life, and provide an essential, empathic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. She will share stories from her personal and professional life. Drawing from history, science, literature, and popular culture, she will offer a powerful roadmap for how we can approach old age--full of joy, wonder, frustration, and outrage. She offers hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself.
With modern increases in human lifespans, the period of elderhood-what Aronson calls the third and final stage of life, after childhood and adulthood-may now span forty or more years of our lives. But in American society, at the very moment that we are living longer than ever before, we have turned old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, neglected, and denied, as we try to avoid the signs of our own aging and mortality.
From her personal and professional experiences, she envisions a large-scale shift in society's - and medicine's - attitude toward aging, made up of crucial adjustments in how we see the changes in each other's and our own bodies, how we care for older people, how we set doctors' salaries and bill patients, and ultimately, how we conceive of the final third of life: not as an ending or decline, but as yet another stage of life with its hardships and challenges, opportunities and joys.
In this episode, you will be challenged to:
Re-examine the meaning of aging
Recognize how our views of aging and medical practices reflect a broken system that often exacerbate aging problems.
Reframe our later decades to better prepare for and thrive in those final years.
Transform our views about aging and lead us to make different choices for ourselves and in policy, ones that improve the experience of elderhood.
About Louise Aronson, MD:
Louise Aronson, MD, MFA, is a leading geriatrician, writer, educator, professor of medicine at UCSF and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Aronson has received the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year award, and the American Geriatrics Society Clinician-Teacher of the Year award. Her writing credits include her previous book, A History of the Present Illness: Stories, as well as the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Discover, Vox, JAMA, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and she has been featured on NPR's Fresh Air, TODAY, CBS This Morning, Morning Edition, Politico, Kaiser Health News, Tech Nation, and the New Yorker.
Get in touch with Louise:
Louise's book: Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life https://revolutionizeretirement.com/aronson
Louise's website: https://louisearonson.com/
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