Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

For decades, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet, at the very moment humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, neglected, and denied. This presentation challenges not only the way we look at aging but also the way we think and feel about medicine and what it means to be a human being across the lifespan.

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SPEAKER:

Louise Aronson, MD, MFA

Dr. Aronson is a leading geriatrician, writer, educator, professor of medicine at UCSF and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist “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 the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Discover, Vox, JAMA, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and she has been featured on TODAY, CBS This Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, Morning Edition, Politico, Kaiser Health News, Tech Nation and The New Yorker.