The Friends of the Talbot County Free Library will begin the 2013-14 Brown Bag Lunch Speaker series at noon on September 19 at the Easton Branch with a talk by Jason Karlawish, MD, entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk about Alzheimer’s.” Dr. Karlawish is a Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA.
There is no charge for this public program sponsored by the Friends of the Talbot County Free Library. Guests are invited to bring their lunch if they like or just come to listen. Coffee and sweets will be provided. The talk will take approximately one hour, and there will be time for questions.
According to Dr. Karlawish, “Alzheimer’s disease is among the most feared diseases of the 21st century, causing patients and families tremendous suffering. As many as five million people may have it, and we pay as much as $200 billion a year to take care of these patients. Yet Americans are struggling to make sense of this disease. Basic questions such as ‘What is Alzheimer’s disease?’ and ‘What’s the difference between it and dementia?’ remain all too common.”
Dr. Karlawish will explain these basic concepts and then go the next step to reflect on why these questions persist. What we talk about when we talk about Alzheimer’s disease reveals the challenges we face when we try to draw distinct borders between normal brain aging and disease.
Dr. Karlawish is a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Fellow at the Institute on Aging at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as the Director of Penn’s Neurodegenerative Disease Ethics and Policy Program, is Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center, and is the Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center’s Education, Recruitment and Retention Core. His clinical practice focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.
Dr. Karlawish studied medicine at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University, and he did post-graduate fellowships in bioethics and geriatric medicine at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on neuroethics, particularly in research and care of older adults, and persons with late-life cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. He has investigated issues in dementia drug development, informed consent, quality of life, research and treatment decision making, biomarkers, and voting by persons with cognitive impairment and residents of long term care facilities.
Dr. Karlawish developed the ACED (the Assessment for Capacity for Everyday Decision-making), an instrument to assist in judging a person’s capacity to manage his/her functional deficits that has been adopted by providers in care management and adult protective services. His current research is examining the clinical and policy implications of how risk is changing concepts of disease, medicine, health and aging. This work has introduced the concept of “desktop medicine,” a model of medicine grounded in a concept of disease as risk and treatment as risk reduction. He is collaborating with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to examine the ethics of dopamine neurotransmitter imaging of asymptomatic persons, and with the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study and the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative on their efforts to implement clinical trials in cognitively normal persons at risk for cognitive decline.
His serves on the Board of Directors of The Greenwall Foundation, the largest foundation dedicated to supporting research in bioethics; is chair of the Internal Ethics Committee of the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study; is a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging; and is associate editor for ethics, policy and economics for the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Dr. Karlawish is a Fellow of the Hastings Center. He has participated in NIH study sections for the Alzheimer’s Disease Core Centers, the human subject research ethics panel and the Paul Beeson Scholars Program.
In 2011, Dr. Karlawish’s novel, Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont, was published and has since received favorable reviews from The New York Times, JAMA, The Lancet, The Wall Street Journal, and the authors Mary Roach, Sherwin Nuland, Jackson Taylor, Richard Selzer and Karl Iagnemma. The story fictionalizes true events along the early 19th century American frontier when Dr. William Beaumont saved Alexis St. Martin, an illiterate French-Canadian fur trapper, from a gunshot wound, but then transformed his patient into a research subject in order to study gastric digestion through a fistula created by the wound into the man’s stomach.
Learn more about Dr. Karlawish from his website, www.jasonkarlawish.com, or contact the Talbot County Free Library at 410-8221626 or visit www.tcfl.org.
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