The New England Journal of Medicine reports an epidemiologic study of in-hospital CPR in older patients (65 years of age and older). The study identified over 430,000 Medicare beneficiaries who...

A few weeks have passed since I went to the Fall board meeting for the AAHPM and I wanted to report back to everyone.  I don't think this has ever been done from an insiders perspective and when I thought of running to be on the board, frankly I wasn't...

If you are in anyway connected to training in palliative medicine you need to make sure your learners know about the Case Conference submission deadline.  It is today November 3rd!  This is the key forum for trainees of all levels and disciplines to...

Image by ~MVI~ via Flickr In the House version of the Health Care Reform Bill submitted last week, the provision for physician reimbursement once every 5 years for Advance Care Planning (also erroneously known as Death Panels) was kept in. ...

Two related articles on dialysis in older patients, as I alluded to in last week's post: First is from the NEJM and looks at functional status in older adults residing in nursing homes before and after initiating dialysis. It uses data from the...

NEJM has an important paper about the natural history of advanced dementia. The data come from a prospective study (2003-7) of patients with advanced dementia residing in 22 nursing homes in the Boston area. 'Advanced' dementia here means patients...