Redefining Aging with Louise Aronson, MD
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Welcome to another special episode of The Nocturnist, stories from the world of medicine. I'm Emily Silverman. As we work on season three of the podcast, we wanted to share a wonderful conversation I recently had in front of a live audience with physician author Louise Aronson. Louise recently wrote a monumental new book called Elderhood, Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine and Reimagining Life. The week leading up to our conversation, I tore through Louise's book, where she shares her personal journey, medical anecdotes, philosophy, research and a dash of humor to make an urgent case for changing the way we as a society view aging and disease. By the time I finished the book, my perspective on aging had totally transformed.
And I'm not alone. Shortly after the book was published, it jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list. And I think this is because its message is so universal. In the age of modern medicine, we're all going to get old, if we're lucky anyway. And that comes with a big set of challenges, which Louise helps us navigate really beautifully in the text. In addition to being a geriatrician at UCSF, Louise is a frequent contributor to CBS This Morning, NPR, and The New York Times. I spoke to her at Podcast Theater at the Betabrand store in the Mission District of San Francisco. To start, I asked her to read an excerpt from the very beginning of the book.
On a foggy morning in 2015, I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley for an appointment with Professor Guy Mikko. I had heard about an exercise he did every fall with his new medical students, and I wanted to see it for myself. Standing at the front of a cramped classroom, Mikko asked a group of 16 students to put down the first words that came to mind when he used the word old in reference to a person. Don't filter, he said. Just write. With his thick white mustache and ring of flyaway hair, Mikko bore a vague resemblance to Albert Einstein, an effect compounded over the next two hours by his wide-ranging curiosity and distractibility. The young men and women around the single large table were first year students in a joint medicine public health graduate program that describes its matriculates as, quote, passionately dedicated to improving the world's health.
They ranged in age from early to middle 20s and their resumes attested to extraordinarily idealistic good intentions. The students began scribbling on the scratch paper Mikko provided so he could collect responses and assess trends over time. When one minute elapsed, he told them to stop, and then he repeated his instructions, but this time with the word elder. A few students shook their heads. They knew they were being manipulated. Mikko had been doing this exercise with his students and actually his friends and colleagues for years. The faces in the room changed, but their responses to the two prompts did not. There were no trends reflecting shifts in how his students thought and felt about old age, not yet anyway.
So he wasn't surprised when the most common associations with the word old included wrinkled, bent over, slow moving, bald, and white hair. Many also wrote, weak, fragile, feeble, frail, or sick. A sizable minority put down a variation of a grandparent, and several listed their mothers, though generally the parents of medical students range in age from late 40s to early 60s, years most people consider part of middle age. Some used words like wisdom, but more chose sad, pejorative, stubborn, and lonely. One wrote, quote, smelling of mothballs and stale smoke. For Elder, the list looked very different. By far, the most common word was wise. Other responses were respect, leader, experience, power, money, and knowledge.
Thank you very much.
So just to begin, I'd like to ask, how did this book come about?
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