But despite challenges and lower pay, geriatrics offers doctors a chance to practice more human, mission-based medicine.
Care for older people requires a degree of complexity that doesn’t exist in primary care aimed at other adults.Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans over the age of 65 grew faster than it has in more than 100 years. The American population is older than it’s ever been, with more than 55 million people over 65.
But many doctors don’t learn enough about these differences in medical schools, the majority of which don’t report requiring a geriatric rotation. This also means a missed opportunity for future doctors, who might find greater fulfillment and lower burnout in a specialty that centers the kind of mission-based, patient-centered medicine many aspiring doctors value.
Care for older people requires a degree of complexity that doesn’t exist in primary care aimed at other adults. Geriatricians are trained to handle overprescriptions and multiple chronic conditions. They contend with end-of-life care. And they must do this with patients who are not always cognitively or emotionally able to comply with their treatment.
Yet practitioners believe that if more med students knew what geriatric medicine was really like, the right kinds of people would be motivated to enter the field. Certainly, many physicians feel overwhelmed and unhappy these days with their profession. But geriatricians are among the happiest of all specialists, Dr. Cynthia Boyd, the director of the division of geriatric medicine and gerontology at the school of medicine at Johns Hopkins, points out.
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