ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF GERIATRIC MEDICINE

If you need a clear, clinically grounded resource for understanding the complex medical needs of aging patients, this textbook gives you a structured path through the core principles of geriatric practice.

Essential Principles of Geriatric Medicine is written for medical students, residents, nurses, allied health professionals, and clinicians who need a practical reference for the evaluation and management of older patients. It connects aging biology with real-world bedside problems, helping readers understand why illness presents differently in later life and how function, cognition, medications, social support, and goals of care shape clinical decisions.

Rather than treating aging as a simple list of diseases, this book presents geriatric medicine as an integrated discipline. It explains how reduced physiologic reserve, multimorbidity, frailty, atypical presentation, and treatment burden affect diagnosis and management. The result is a practical, educational resource for readers who want to think more clearly about older patients in hospitals, clinics, long-term settings, and community-based practice.

Inside, you will learn how to:

• Understand the biology of aging and the loss of physiologic reserve
• Apply comprehensive geriatric assessment across medical, functional, cognitive, psychological, and social domains
• Recognize atypical and nonspecific disease presentations in aging patients
• Approach frailty, sarcopenia, falls, delirium, dementia, polypharmacy, incontinence, wounds, nutrition, infections, and common comorbidities
• Use structured reasoning for safer prescribing, deprescribing, care transitions, palliative planning, capacity, ethics, and elder advocacy
• Build patient-centered care plans that balance clinical evidence with independence, comfort, safety, and personal goals