We’ve covered psychedelics on the podcast before—first in 2019 with Ira Byock, where we explored their potential role in medicine, and then again in 2023 with Stacy Fischer, Brian Anderson, and Theora Cimino, focusing on the reasons to approach psychedelic use in patients with caution.

In today’s episode, we’re taking a closer look at the current state of the science around one specific psychedelic: psilocybin. We'll discuss three recent clinical trials involving patients with serious illness, joined by our guests James Downar, Ali John Zarrabi, and Margaret Ross.

We begin with a refresher on psilocybin—what it is, how it might work, what conditions it may help treat (including demoralization), and how it’s typically administered. What makes this episode especially compelling is our deep dive into the three studies, which highlight two different approaches to using psilocybin: daily microdosing, similar to traditional antidepressants, and a more intensive model known as psilocybin-assisted therapy. This latter approach involves three structured phases—preparation, the dosing session, and post-session integration with trained therapists.

Peter Selwyn, one of today’s guests, has been caring for people living with HIV for over 40 years. In that time, care of people with HIV has changed dramatically. Initially, there was no treatment, then treatments with marginal efficacy, complex schedules, and a tremendous burden of side effects and drug-drug interactions. The average age at death was in the 30s.

Now, more people in the US die with HIV rather than from HIV. Treatment regimens are simplified, and the anti-viral drugs are well tolerated. People are living with HIV into advanced ages. The average age at death is likely in the 60s. Nearly half of people living with HIV are over age 55. One in 10 people with newly diagnosed HIV is an older adult. Our second guest, Meredith Greene, is a geriatrician and researcher who focuses on care of older adults living with HIV, in the US and Africa.

On today’s podcast we discuss:

• Implications of aging with HIV for clinical care

• Loneliness and social isolation among older adults living with HIV

• Persistence of stigma

• Need to consider HIV in the differential diagnosis for older adults

• Screening for HIV

• Screening for osteoporosis in people living with HIV

• Dementia and cognitive impairment risk in people living with HIV

• When to stop anti-virals near the end of life

Toward the end we speak to the moment. More older adults live with HIV in SubSaharan Africa and the global South than anywhere else in the world. Funding for research and clinical care is at risk, as USAID and PEPFAR (which is under USAID), are shuttered. Millions of lives are at stake. Meredith wore a shirt that said Silence=death.

Eric gave me the hook during my live cover of One, by U2, a song released in 1992 whose proceeds went entirely to AIDS research. I couldn’t help it, forgive me dear listeners, I had to do a longer than usual cut at the start!

-Alex Smith

Useful links:

Peter's article on the evolution of HIV: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-011-9552-y

Peter’s book Surviving the Fall: Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor

PEPFAR: Global Health Policy | KFF

Articles:

Geriatric Syndromes in Older HIV-Infected Adults - PMC

Loneliness in Older Adults Living with HIV

Management of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in Advanced Age
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3684249/

About Act-up for those who might know the Silence=Death t-shirt reference:
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/16/1007361916/act-up-a-history-of-aids-hiv-activism

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/how-act-up-changed-america

More and more people are, “doing their own research.” Self-identified experts and influencers on podcasts (podcasts!) and social media endorse treatments that are potentially harmful and have little to no evidence of benefit, or have only been studied in animals. An increasing number of federal leaders have a track record of endorsing such products.

We and our guests have noticed that in our clinical practices, patients and caregivers seem to be asking for such treatments more frequently. Ivermectin to treat cancer. Stem cell treatments. Chelation therapy. Daneila Lamas wrote about this issue in the New York Times this week -after we recorded - in her story, a family requested an herbal infusion for their dying mother via feeding tube.

Our guests today, Adam Marks, Laura Taylor, & Jill Schneiderhan, have coined a term for such therapies, for Potentially Unsafe Low-evidence Treatments, or PULET. Rhymes with mullet (On the podcast we debate using the French pronunciation, though it sounds the same as the French word for chicken). We discuss an article they wrote about PULET for the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, including:

• What makes a PULET a PULET? Key ingredients are both potentially unsafe and low evidence. If it’s low evidence but not unsafe, not generally an issue. Think vitamins. If it’s potentially unsafe, but has robust evidence, well that’s most of the treatments we offer seriously ill patients! Think chemo.

• What counts as potentially unsafe? They include what might be obvious, e.g. health risks, and less obvious, e.g. financial toxicity.

• What counts as low-evidence? Animal studies? Theoretical only?

• Does PULET account for avoiding known effective treatments?

• Do elements of care that are often administered to seriously ill patients count? Yes. Think chemotherapy to imminently dying patients, or CPR.

• How does integrative medicine fit in with this? Jill Schneiderhan, a family medicine and integrative medicine doc, helps us think through this.

• How ought clinicians respond? Hint: If you’re arguing over the scientific merits of a research study, you’re probably not doing it right. Instead, think VitalTalk, REMAP, and uncover and align with the emotion behind the request.

• Does the approach shift when it’s a caregiver requesting PULET for an older relative who lost capacity? How about parents advocating for a child?

For more, Laura suggests a book titled, How to Talk to a Science Denier.

And I am particularly happy that the idea for this podcast arose from my visit to Michigan to give Grand Rounds, and the conversations I had with Adam and Laura during the visit. We love it when listeners engage with us to suggest topics that practicing clinicians find challenging.

And I get to sing Bon Jovi’s Bad Medicine, which is such a fun song!

-Alex Smith

I read Farah Stockman’s article in the NYT on why attacks on DEI will cost us all, and thought, “Yes, and ‘everyone’ includes harm to our healthcare workforce, our patients, and their families.”

So we’re delighted that Farah Stockman, pulitzer prize winning journalist, author of American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, and editorial board member at the New York TImes joins us to set the bigger picture for this discussion. Farah provides clear examples from the Biden administration, in which having the most diverse cabinet in history was critical to building bridges, empathy, and inspiring others to feel included.

We are also pleased to welcome Ali Thomas, a hospitalist, member of the Baha'i Faith, leader of anti-racism efforts in the Pacific Northwest, and founder of the BIPOC Health Careers Ecosystem. Ali talks about the history of affirmative action, which started as a program for Whites, the importance of diversity in the healthcare workforce, the history of allyship and cross cultural collaboration, and his own efforts to provide opportunity and support for historically oppressed groups in his own community to obtain healthcare careers.

And Ken Covinsky, avid baseball fanatic, joins us and notes that the day we record (April 15) is Jackie Robinson day. Many may be familiar with the story of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947, but may not be aware of the tremendous adversity Jackie Robinson faced, and persistence he displayed, off the field.

We address many things, including:

• The movement in Corporate America and institutes of higher education to implement DEI programming in the wake of George Floyd

• The general agreement in America of the value of diversity, and disagreement, unpopularity, and backlash about DEI as it was implemented

• How the pursuit of diversity and excellence are not in tension, they are aligned and necessary for each other

• What we can do to build bridges across differences

There was so much we hoped to talk about and didn’t get to, but I will link to now, including: Ali’s mom’s personal history with and study of school desegregation in South Carolina, Farah’s mom’s pioneering work as a speech language pathologist, and Ken’s perspectives on the importance of studying ageism and racism in research.

What a Wonderful World could be sung in irony at this moment. I hope we all take it literally, with the hope this podcast ends with. The podcast follows the arc towards hope of this video on Race Amity from the National Center for Race Amity, courtesy of Ali Thomas (his dad is featured).

-Alex Smith

Early in my research career, I was fascinated by the (then) frontier area of palliative care in the emergency department. I asked emergency medicine clinicians what they thought when a patient who is seriously ill and DNR comes to the ED, and some responded, (paraphrasing), what are they doing here? This is not why I went into emergency medicine. I went into emergency medicine to act. I can’t do the primary thing I’ve been trained to do: ABC, ABC, ABCs. Most emergency providers wanted to do the right thing for seriously ill patients, but they didn’t have the knowledge, skills, or experience to do it.

Today we focus on an intervention, published in JAMA, that gave emergency clinicians basic palliative care knowledge, training, and skills. We talk with Corita Grudzen and Fernanda Bellolio about their cluster stepped wedge randomized trial of a palliative care intervention directed at emergency clinicians. They got training in Vital Talk and ELNEC. They got a decision support tool that identified hospice patients or those who might benefit from a goals of care discussion. They got feedback.

So did it matter? Hmmm….it depends. We are fortunate to have Tammie Quest, emergency and palliative trained and long a leader in this space, to help us unpack and contextualize these findings.

Today we discuss:

• Why the study was negative for the primary (hospitalization) and all secondary outcome (e.g. hospice use).

• Why to emergency clinicians, this study was a wild success because they had the skills they wanted/needed to feel like they could do the right thing (during the onset of Covid no less).

• Why this study was a success due to the sheer size (nearly 100,000 patients in about 30 EDs) of the study, and the fact that, as far as the investigators know, all study sites continue to employ the clinical decision support tool.

• What is a cluster stepped wedge randomized trial?

• Were they surprised by the negative findings?

• How do we situate this study in the context of other negative primary palliative care interventions, outside the ED? E.g. Yael Shenker’s negative study of primary palliative care for cancer, Randy Curtis’s negative study of a Vital Talk-ish intervention, Lieve Van den Block’s negative study of primary PC in nursing homes. Why do so many (most, all??) primary palliative care interventions seem to fail, whereas specialized palliative care interventions have a relatively robust track record of success. Should we give up on primary palliative care? What’s next for primary palliative care interventions in the ED?

And if your Basic Life Support training certification is due, you can practice the correct chest compression rate of 110 beats per minute to Another One Bites the Dust.

-Alex Smith

Whelp, goodbye folks! Eric and I have been DOGE’d.

In a somewhat delayed April Fools, Nancy Lundebjerg and Annie Medina-Walpole have taken over podcast host duties this week.

Their purpose is to interview me, Eric, and Ken Covinsky about your final AGS literature review plenary session taking place at the Annual Meeting in Chicago this May (for those attending, our session is the plenary the morning of May 10). We discuss our favorite articles, parody songs, and memories from AGS meetings past, with a little preview of a song for this year’s meeting.

We covered:

• The first parody song I wrote, for AGS 2018 in Orlando, about this article by Nancy Schoenborn on how to discuss stopping cancer screening.

• Ken’s favorite articles, including

• • The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial

  • Effect of Exercise Intervention on Functional Decline in Very Elderly Patients During Acute Hospitalization

• Eric’s favorite article on the effect of chair placement on physicians’ behavior and patients’ satisfaction

• Tim Anderson’s study on the intensification of older adults’ outpatient blood pressure treatment at hospital discharge

• Nancy’s favorite topic and parody song, Aducanumab, which won Drug of the Year in 2021.

Enjoy! And maybe, just maybe, Eric and I will be reinstated and return as hosts next week…

-Alex Smith

A pragmatic trial evaluates the effectiveness of a treatment or intervention in “real-world” clinical practice. Outcomes are typically assessed from available records. Eligibility in pragmatic trials are often broad, and don’t have the exclusions of efficacy studies, which examine treatment effects under highly controlled conditions in highly select populations.

Today we are delighted to welcome Jennifer Wolff, Sydney Dy, and Danny Scerpella, who conducted a pragmatic trial of advance care planning (ACP) in primary care practices; and Jasmine Santoyo-Olsson, who wrote an accompanying commentary in JAMA Internal Medicine.

We spend the last portion of the podcast discussing the surprising finding of the study. In the primary care practices that received the advance care planning intervention, rates of advance care planning were higher (about double). Shockingly, rates of potentially burdensome intervention (intubation, CPR, etc) were also higher in the advance care planning intervention group. What?!? Not a typo.

We spend some time unpacking and contextualizing the potential reasons for this surprising finding, including:

• Disconnect between relatively low rates of new advance directives (12% in intervention arm vs 7% control) and higher rates of potentially burdensome treatment among decedents (29% in intervention arm vs 21% control). Only 5% of intervention patients received the facilitator led component of the intervention (there were other components, facilitator-led was the most engaged component). Was there really a causal connection between the intervention, new advance directives, and higher rates of potentially burdensome interventions?

• Potential that care received, though potentially burdensome, was in fact aligned with goals, and might represent goal concordant care.

• Potential that documenting advance directives without a robust conversation about prognosis might have led to these findings. My goals will differ if I think I probably have 2 years to live vs 10 years.

• Comparison to a trial Yael Shenker discussed in our podcast on AAHPM/HPNA plenary abstracts (also used the Respecting Choices intervention, outcome differed).

• Implications for the larger discussion over the value of advance care planning, and additional research into advance care planning. As I say on the podcast, I’m sure Sean Morrison would be delighted to point to these findings as evidence that advance care planning doesn’t work, and in fact may be harmful.

And I got to sing in Spanish for the second time. I hope my pronunciation is better than my Urdu, or French!

-Alex Smith

Eric and Alex have featured discussions about complex bioethical concepts around caring for people at the end of life, including voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), and multiple episodes about the ethical issues surrounding medical aid in dying (MAID). Recently, discussion has emerged about how these issues intertwine in caring for patients with advancing dementia who have stated that they would not want to continue living in that condition: for those with an advanced directive to stop eating and drinking, how do we balance caring for their rational past self and their experiential current self? Should these patients qualify for medical aid in dying medications? And is there a middle path to provide some degree of comfort while also hastening the end of life?

To delve into these questions, we spoke with Hope Wechkin, medical director of EvergreenHealth home hospice, who authored an article describing a process of Minimal Comfort Feeding (MCF) for patients who have expressed an interest in not wanting to live with advanced dementia. MCF, which Hope implemented for one of her hospice patients, serves as a middle way between the discomfort to the patient and caregivers of completely withholding food and fluid, and the current practice of comfort feeding only in which food and fluid are routinely offered to patients even in the absence of a symptomatic benefit.

We were also joined by Thaddeus Pope, JD and Dr. Joshua Briscoe, to discuss the topic of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking as a potential bridge to access medical aid in dying medications and their respective articles on the topic. We discussed what makes an illness “terminal”, what goes into assessing capacity for an action as simple as requesting something to drink, and whether the TV show Severance illuminates any of these answers.

-Theo Slomoff, UCSF Palliative Care Fellow 2024-25 (guest host)

Articles referenced in this discussion:

• “Mr. Smith Has No Mealtimes”: Minimal Comfort Feeding for Patients with Advanced Dementia by Hope Wechkin et al in JPSM
• Medical Aid in Dying to Avoid Late-Stage Dementia by Thaddeus Pope and Lisa Brodoff in JAGS
• Law not loopholes: Medical aid in dying for those with dementia also in JAGS by Joshua Briscoe and Eric Widera

Past GeriPal Podcast Episodes on MAID:

MAID podcasts

https://geripal.org/what-is-going-on-with-maid-in-canada-bill-gardner-leonie-herx-sonu-gaind/

https://geripal.org/conscientous-provision-of-maid-and-abortion-robert-brody-lori-freedman-mara-buchbinder/

https://geripal.org/assisted-dying-podcast-with-lewis-cohen/

https://geripal.org/dilemmas-in-aid-in-dying-podcast-with/

Past GeriPal Podcast Episode about VSED:

https://geripal.org/tim-quill-vsed/