Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Louise Aronson was featured on WITF radio; her interview (only 37 minutes long) is quite interesting. Click here to listen.

“Geriatrics is a specialty that should adapt and change with each patient, says physician and author Louise Aronson. ‘I need to be a different sort of doctor for people at different ages and phases of old age.’” – Robert Lang Photography/Getty Images

“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.”