Rachael Bedard: A Geriatric Physician and Champion for Patients Without a Voice

Above is a brief video snippet from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.

Transcript with links to audio and external citations

Eric Topol (00:06):

Well, hello it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted to welcome Dr. Rachael Bedard, who is a physician geriatrician in New York City, and is actually much more multidimensional, if you will. She's a writer. We're going to go over some of her recent writings. She's actually quite prolific. She writes in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Review of Books. If it has New York in front of it, she's probably writing there. She's a teacher. She works on human rights, civil rights, criminal justice in the prison system. She's just done so much that makes her truly unique. That's why I really wanted a chance to meet her and talk with her today. So welcome, Rachael.

Rachael Bedard (00:52):

Thank you, Dr. Topol. It's an honor to be here.

Eric Topol (00:55):

Well, please call me Eric and it's such a joy to have a chance to get acquainted with you as a person who is into so many different things and doing all of them so well. So maybe we'd start off with, because you're the first geriatrician we've had on this podcast.

Practicing Geriatrics and Internal Medicine

Eric Topol (01:16):

And it’s especially apropos now. I wanted maybe to talk about your practice, how you got into geriatrics, and then we'll talk about the piece you had earlier this summer on aging.

Rachael Bedard (01:32):

Sure. I went into medicine to do social justice work and I was always on a funny interdisciplinary track. I got into the Mount Sinai School of Medicine through what was then called the Humanities and Medicine program, which was an early acceptance program for people who were humanities focused undergrads, but wanted to go into medicine. So I always was doing a mix of politics and activist focused work, humanities and writing, that was always interested in being a doctor. And then I did my residency at the Cambridge Health Alliance, which is a social medicine program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and my chief residency there.

(02:23):

I loved being an internist, but I especially loved taking care of complex illness and I especially loved taking care of complex illness in situations where the decision making, there was no sort of algorithmic decision-making, where you were doing incredibly sort of complex patient-centered shared decision making around how to come up with treatment plans, what the goals of care were. I liked taking care of patients where the whole family system wa