Dr. Afsana Safa is a General Practitioner and a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Governing Body member from London, United Kingdom.... Read more about Stop talking, start doing, and take control: an interview with Afsana Safa

Dr. Sandeep Nanwani is a General Physician and part of the department of Bioethics and Medical Amenities at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia and a Masters student at Harvard.... Read more about The physician as an advocate and anthropologist: an interview with Sandeep Nanwani

What are you supposed to say? How are you supposed to react? How do you break bad news to your patients and their families? What do you do when you know there is no chance of improvement? These are the things that you don’t learn in medical school. You learn about diseases, medications, and treatments, but not the best way to educate your patients. I learn that ‘I don’t know’ on a daily basis. You try and fail. One day you realize you should have been more straight with the patient, but when the next patient comes around, that doesn’t work.

Let’s start with the recognition that caring for elders—at the current scale and level of intensity—is a relatively new global phenomenon. And informal caregiving, like other work done mainly by women, has been greatly undervalued. So this issue has been largely invisible to policymakers and a low priority. But there are signs of change. Here’s one: later this summer the Institute of Medicine (IOM) will release its Study on Family...