“Geriatrician” — it’s a word that holds immense gravity and significance, yet remains unfamiliar to many in India.
That is not the fault of patients or families. It is, in part, the fault of those of us who are geriatricians. We have not done enough to make the specialty visible, accessible, or understood. I include myself in that. When I completed my MD in Geriatrics, I thought the hard work was done — the years of training, the exams, the clinical exposure. Now I could simply practice.
I was wrong about what the work was.
The invisible specialty
When I ask patients’ families if they have ever consulted a geriatrician before, the answer is almost always no — often followed by a question about what a geriatrician actually is. This happens even in educated, urban, medically engaged families. The concept of a doctor who specialises specifically in the health of elderly people is simply not part of the cultural vocabulary of healthcare in India.
Compare this to paediatrics, which everyone understands. We accept without question that children need specialist doctors — that the physiology of a two-year-old is fundamentally different from an adult’s, that dosing, diagnosis, and treatment must be calibrated accordingly. The same logic applies exactly to elderly patients, yet the concept has not taken hold in the same way.
The result is that elderly patients are managed by a collection of organ-specific specialists, none of whom are trained in the particular vulnerabilities of ageing — the atypical disease presentations, the drug metabolism changes, the interplay between cognition, nutrition, function, and social support that defines geriatric complexity.
What changed for me
I once hated speaking in public. It felt far removed from clinical medicine, from the work I had trained for. What changed was contact with patients.
I started speaking at health camps, community education sessions, and caregiver awareness events. I began interacting with what I now think of as my “young elderly” friends — men and women in their sixties and seventies, sharp and engaged, who light up when someone finally explains what is happening in their bodies and why. They ask excellent questions. They want to understand their diagnoses, their medicines, their prognosis. They want to be treated as intelligent adults who deserve full information — not as patients to be managed with minimum disruption.
These interactions changed my understanding of what geriatric medicine is for. It is not only a clinical practice. It is a public health mission.
What awareness actually changes
When families understand what a geriatrician does, they start asking different questions of the healthcare system. They ask whether a medication review is needed. They ask whether the fall their parent had last month is a sign of something systemic. They ask whether someone is actually coordinating the care between the cardiologist, the neurologist, and the endocrinologist — or whether they need to do that themselves.
These are the right questions. And they can only be asked if families know that geriatric medicine exists, what it offers, and when to seek it.
India’s elderly population will exceed 300 million within a generation. The number of trained geriatricians is a fraction of what is needed. That gap cannot be closed overnight — but awareness is where it begins. Every family that understands what a geriatrician does is one more family that will seek appropriate care at the right time, rather than years too late.
That is why I write, why I speak, and why I do this work. Hope for healthy ageing is not passive. It is built one informed family at a time.
Geriatric consultations at Manipal Hospital Broadway, Kolkata — and doctor-led home visits in Newtown, Rajarhat & Salt Lake through GeraVita.