Anyone with even a passing interest in longevity, the healthcare crisis, and the cultural context of ageing has heard of my guest, American geriatrician Louise Aronson.

Her groundbreaking book Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining LIfe was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist the day before we spoke.  It was already a New York Times best-seller, praised as a landmark work laying bare the structural faults of society and healthcare systems that fail the old.

Dr Aronson teaches medicine at the University of California in her home town of San Francisco, where she makes house calls alongside her hospital work.

We talk about her writing, why we need to embrace elderhood as a life stage as we do childhood and adulthood, why ‘elder’ is the perfect replacement for ‘older adult’, the “self-defeating hypocrisy” of ageism – exposed anew in the response to the COVID-19 crisis – and how COVID-19 infection can present differently in elders.

Quotes

“How we treat older people tells us almost everything we need to know about what’s wrong with modern health care.”

“We’ve set up a health system that recognises kids and adults and not elders. We’ve also set up a health system that really values technology but not people. And it’s all part of this larger change that’s harming medicine, old people, health care and society.”

“We so often think that the only life that has value is the optimal one and that’s insane because it means 99.98 % of us are losers the whole time.”

Links

• Louise’s profile at the University of California at San Francisco
• Elderhood entry on The Pulitzer Prizes site
• Get your copy of Elderhood here
• Louise’s newly-released TEDMED talk “Embracing elderhood as a stage of life” 
• “Age, Complexity, and Crisis — A Prescription for Progress in Pandemic” – Louise’s latest in The New England Journal of Medicine, April 2020
• “‘COVID-19 Kills Only Old People.’ Only?” – Louise’s opinion piece in The New York Times, March 2020
• “Coronavirus reveals just how little compassion we have for older people” – Louise writing in Vox, March 2020
• “Ageism is Making the Pandemic Worse” – her piece in The Atlantic, March 2020
• “The New COVID-19 Symptoms to Watch For” – older adults can just seem ‘off’, Next Avenue, April 2020
• Louise on Twitter

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