Voices: Dr. Atul Gawande on the personal side of geriatric care: How doctors help their loved ones make medical choices.

Last week, I recorded an interview with Dr. Atul Gawande. Atul, (as he insists we call him) is a best-selling author, influential public health researcher, surgeon, and now serves as the lead for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including some questions asked by Inside Medicine readers. So, we’ve broken this interview up into parts.

Here’s Part 1, streaming for free at Medpage Today. (The audio transcript is also available if you follow the link).

In this installment, I asked Atul about palliative care and geriatric medicine generally. But the highlight of this conversation, to me, was that we both discussed our personal experiences in helping our own parents navigate their medical issues. Atul spoke quite openly about his octogenarian mother’s choices regarding chemotherapy, and I talked about watching my father, in his 70s, push himself a little too hard on the treadmill and how I wrestle over whether to tell him to ease up a bit, lest he keel over, or just leave him alone to do as he pleases without any haranguing by me.

I think you’ll find it interesting to hear two docs talking through how we manage these issues for our patients in general, and also, when the “patients” happen to be our own parents.

I hope you enjoy the conversation, as I did.

By the way, here’s a link to Atul’s best-selling book which we discuss in the interview: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. It’s also available on Audible.com.

Here again is the link to our interview over on Medpage. And I’ll send you the subsequent installments of this conversation as they go live.

—JF