Geriatric medicine in a nutshell

For the past month, I spent Thursday afternoons at the VA Geriatrics clinic as part of my sub-specialty requirement for Adult Ambulatory Care. My mentor was fantastic. About half of the patients I saw at some point during the interview said of him, "That man walks on water!" For his part, my geriatrics preceptor brushed that off and laid all the credit at his patients' feet for doing the hard work.

From my perspective, there's some truth to both my mentor's story and his patients' claims. He has a special way with his patients, and I tried to glean as much wisdom as possible in my 16 hours with him. The following are some nuggets of wisdom that come either from my observations of his practice or directly from him. They summarize fairly well the practice of geriatric medicine:

• There are three diseases that you need to avoid in order to make it to your 90's: 1) Heart disease, 2) Cancer, and 3) Dementia.


• Likewise, there are three diseases that you will almost certainly have if you are lucky enough to make it to your 90's: 1) Arthritis, 2) Vision loss, and 3) Hearing loss. If you had a practice purely of 90-year-olds, you would likely be focused on those issues.


• In an elderly patient, prevention measures may be less useful in long-term processes such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. When a patient's life expectancy is short (recognizing that we are not very good at predicting it), the benefits of getting their blood pressure or lipids at goal might be outweighed by harmful side effects of medications.


• Avoiding polypharmacy is a big challenge. Always consider whether a drug is truly needed, how it will interact with drugs that the patient is already taking, and the impact of its side-effects on the patient's overall health. This should be true for all patients but particularly so for the elderly who are more vulnerable.


• Improving the quality of life is sometimes more important than extending life.


• Speak loudly and slowly to your elderly patients, smile a lot, ask them about their lives, and listen to their stories with genuine interest.

Interviewing patients who only speak Spanish

The patient population of Westside Clinic is 75% Hispanic, a large portion of whom speak only Spanish. This presents the particular challenge of learning how to effectively interview these patients either by using the Denver Health translator service or by trying to interview them myself in Spanish.

I started studying Spanish in middle school, took it all throughout high school, and earned a minor in Spanish in college. I traveled for long periods of time in Spanish-speaking countries, and I grew up in Southern California. Even with all of that Spanish under my belt, I'm still not proficient enough in Spanish to feel like I can effectively interview a patient who only speaks Spanish, without possibly missing something that I wouldn't have missed with an English-speaker.

In fact, studies have shown that there is an increased incidence of medical errors when there is a language barrier. Because of this, a doctor at Denver Health who wishes to provide care in a second language must demonstrate proficiency in that language and be certified as "interpreter status." At least 4 of the attending physicians with whom I have worked these past few weeks have interpreter status for Spanish.

This offers me the opportunity to practice my Spanish in the clinical setting, since my Spanish-speaking supervisors provide quality control. I was very rusty during my first week. Given that I was green as grass my first week, too, I was pretty much a disaster that first week when I was put in with a Spanish-speaking patient.

Since then, though, my Spanish has improved as much as my clinical skills. I'd estimate that I understand about 80-90% of what my patients say and that I'm able to communicate about 70-80% of what I want to say. Those numbers go up if the patient understands even a minimal amount of English. Still, it's not enough for me to feel comfortable that I wouldn't be missing something important that would impact my ability to effectively care for my Spanish-speaking patients.

I have enough of a foothold, though, to justify practicing my Spanish. This past week, I was seeing a Spanish-speaking woman in her 60's who had wildly uncontrolled blood sugars. As I was gathering her history, I got the feeling that she was having a very difficult time emotionally dealing with her diabetes and that she was possibly depressed. I decided to administer the PHQ-9, a questionnaire that screens for depression, and found that she was indeed severely impaired by depression. This was all in Spanish. My attending hadn't picked up the depression during her prior visits, and he ended up deciding to treat her with fluoxetine.

This patient interaction emphasized to me how important it is to be able to communicate with my Spanish-speaking patients in their own language. A good goal for me is to achieve interpreter status in Spanish.

The importance of reading patient charts

A patient came in today complaining of stomach pain and alternating constipation and diarrhea over the last 1-2 months. She wanted a referral for a colonoscopy.

She said that she has had stomach pains since childhood (likely related to abuse that she suffered) but that her stomach got much worse over the past year to the point that she hasn't been able to eat without feeling nauseous and sometimes throwing up. She denied blood in her stool, denied black stools, but said that here stools were "greasy." Moreover, she said that she lost about 50 pounds in the last year without trying to lose weight, going from a waist size 44 to a 34. She denied fevers and chills but said that she sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with the bed drenched in sweat.

She has a 100 pack-year smoking history under her belt as well as a substantial history of drug abuse of many drugs. Her family history is significant for her mother who died of colorectal cancer when she was 60 years old.

I was obviously very concerned about possible colorectal cancer with this history. As I presented the case to my attending, though, she didn't seem to share my concerns. Why not?

My attending had provided me with limited background to this patient's case but threw me in the room without giving me time to review the patient's chart. After I had finished the interview and exam, I didn't have any time to look into the chart before my attending wanted to hear about our patient.

My patient did in fact unintentionally lose 50 pounds in less than a year, but that was two years ago; her weight has been stable since then at a healthy BMI of 24.0. When her weight was in a free-fall, my attending was justifiably very concerned about possible cancer.

My attending tried at the time to convince our patient to get a colonoscopy, but the patient refused. Now she came back a year-and-a-half later because her symptoms got worse, and she was requesting the colonoscopy.

All of this underscores the importance of reviewing the patient's chart and corroborating the patient's story with objective evidence or documentation whenever possible. This patient was unable to provide critical details of her illness that shifted concern away from the possibility of colorectal cancer.

It would be very easy for me to jump to the conclusion: Don't trust patients. It's more complicated than that, though. I think that a large portion of patients are unfortunately poor historians, but it's also true that doctors often rely on patients' subjective experiences in deciding on a course of treatment. My job, then, is to make a judgment call of how much I can rely on the unsubstantiated "testimony" of my patients and to seek objective corroborating evidence whenever possible. That's what a physical exam is for, and that's what chart review is for.

Thankfully, my attending acknowledged that she hadn't given me time to review the chart and that I couldn't have known these pertinent facts that conflicted with the patient's story.

Adult Urgent Care Center: Learning to widen my differential

I had the opportunity this afternoon to accompany one of my attendings during her shift at the Denver Health Adult Urgent Care Center. This is like one step down from the Emergency Room, taking patients who are acutely ill but not necessarily a medical emergency.

One patient I saw was an elderly woman who came in with a subjective fever, chills, sore throat, cough productive of green sputum, and shortness of breath. She had these symptoms for 1 week, but she came in today because her shortness of breath got worse and because her throat hurt so bad she could hardly even drink water let alone eat. She has a 50 pack-year smoking history, and she denied any recent sick contacts or travel.

I could hear her wheezing from across the room. On exam I found an inflamed throat coated with a thick white mucus. Listening to her lungs I heard expiratory wheezes but no signs that there might be a fluid buildup.

When we sent her for a chest x-ray, I was thinking mostly about a possible atypical pneumonia or upper respiratory infection. Her presentation was screaming of an infectious cause so much that I didn't really think much of other possible causes of her symptoms.

On further questioning by my attending physician, my patient reported pain in her back, swelling in her ankles, and sleeping propped up on 3 pillows at night. These together raise red flags for congestive heart failure. Her heart sounded great, though, and I only found a trace amount of fluid accumulation in her lower legs. We ran an EKG on her just in case, and it was unchanged from an EKG done a few months earlier when she didn't have these symptoms. This all pointed away from CHF as the culprit.

My attending also drew my attention to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as a possible cause of her symptoms. However, she had recently done pulmonary function tests that were normal, lowering COPD on the differential.

Her chest x-ray came back with no consolidations making pneumonia much less likely. It turns out that she had reactive airway disease from an acute asthma exacerbation likely caused by a viral upper respiratory infection. We treated her asthma with an oral steroid and an albuterol nebulizer, and we treated her cough with cheratussin.

Even though I was partly right about her illness being infectious in nature, and that it was likely viral, I didn’t pick up that her viral infection was causing an acute asthma exacerbation. The expiratory wheezes should have given it away. More frustrating, I zeroed in too quickly on the infectious nature of her illness to the exclusion of other possibilities such as COPD or CHF exacerbation, which were perfectly reasonable to include in the differential given her past medical history.

This is a typical mistake for a third-year medical student to make – and I learned a lot from it.

Adult Ambulatory: Halfway through my first clerkship

Time flies when you're having fun. It's hard to believe that I'm already halfway through my first clinical rotation, Adult Ambulatory Care (AAC). A lot of people have asked me, "What does Adult Ambulatory mean, anyways?" I confess that I wasn't exactly sure, myself, before this clerkship began. Adult Ambulatory is outpatient doctor's office care.

Fourteen of my classmates are in AAC with me. Everyone is placed at their own site, and each site has its own character. A friend of mine was placed with a solo-practice physician where it's just the doctor, one nurse, and my medical student friend. Another classmate of mine was placed at an outpatient clinic in the VA hospital, which has a much more hectic atmosphere.

I was placed at Westside Clinic, which is a satellite clinic of Denver Health. It serves a socioeconomically disadvantaged population, and a large percentage of patients only speak Spanish.


Because of the nature of the doctors' schedules, I don't have one specific doctor who is mentoring me throughout this one-month rotation but instead follow whichever doctor is covering triage for a given shift. This is a stark contrast from my friend's solo-practice experience. So far, I have followed around about a half-dozen doctors, most of them for several shifts. All of my attending physicians are very nice, fun to work with, and invested in helping me improve my clinical skills.

At first, I was uncertain how I would be evaluated by so many mentors. One doctor is primarily responsible for overseeing my education at Westside; all the other doctors provide feedback to that primary mentor, and they synthesize that feedback into a single evaluation. This has meant a little bit of extra work and stress on my part forging good working relationships with many different attendings, but in the end I'm glad for the experience. Each one of them has their own particular style of interacting with patients and preferences of how they want me to present patients to them. I think that this has given me more versatility in the way I communicate with my supervisors.

My schedule is much more luxurious than I could have hoped for. I was expecting to work crazy 'round-the-clock hours, but it turns out that I am essentially working 8am-5pm. When I show up earlier than 8am, the building is locked, and I wait around like a fool for someone with a badge to open the door. I do often stay later than 5pm to read or catch up on my notes, but most of the doctors are gone by 5:30.

I am very aware that my schedule will change dramatically when I start my Internal Medicine rotation in June. But for now, I'm going to have fun and enjoy it while I can!

Goals for my Adult Outpatient rotation

Before I start my first clinical rotation, I thought that it would be helpful for me to articulate my goals for the next month.

My first goal is to give very good to excellent patient presentations. What this means to me is providing my supervisors with >95% of the information they're looking for in an organized and concise manner. My second goal is to start to suggest reasonable management plans. What this means to me is that the plans I suggest are medically appropriate and that my attending may modify them or add to them slightly. My overall goal is to improve my clinical skills and learn as much as I can during my Adult Outpatient rotation.