Replay: Louise Aronson shares Five Things She's Learned About Elderhood
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“If there is a single useful idea I hope you might take away from this conversation, it’s this: We would all have more fulfilling lives and less to fear about extreme old age if every time we speak of or make policy for children and adults or childhood and adulthood we also include elders and elderhood.”
– Louise Aronson, Five Things I've Learned About Elderhood
Louise Aronson MD MFA, is a leading geriatrician, writer, educator, professor of medicine at UCSF. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life, which draws from history, science, literature, popular culture – and from her own life – to weave a vision of old age that is full of ambition, humor, outrage, joy, wonder, and hope. Here's the first five minutes of our recent 90-minute class in which she shares the Five Things She’s Learned about improving our shared healthcare system, aging, and the decades of old age now increasingly known as elderhood.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Elderhood shares Louise’s informed, considered take on the right ways to think about the final passages of our lives:
Old age happens to (almost) all of us
Being old is so much better than people think
Aging could be so much better than it is
Our attitudes, policies and systems manufacture many of the hardest parts of old age
Elderhood is one of the most exciting areas of human potential and innovation.
Louise’s conversation with Kris Rebillot is part of our ongoing series, Five Things I’ve Learned about Living Better Longer. These 90-minute sessions share the insights, perspectives, and experiences of renowned researchers and scientists devoted to exploring the ways in which we age and to applying their knowledge to improve our lives.
If you’re eager to discover the insights we need to make the most of the possibilities that await us as we age, this conversation is for you.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Louise 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. At UCSF, Louise has served as director of the Pathways to Discovery program, the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center, the Optimizing Aging Project, and as Chief of Geriatrics Education. 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. Currently, she divides her time among patient care, community-based aging innovations, teaching, health advocacy in the media, and writing.
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