HealthJournalism.org: This year’s conference delves into all of these, and then some. Friday’s panels include a session on the complications of coordinating senior care, (with eldercare specialists I have not yet had a chance to interview so I am excited about new sources!), and a session on end-of-life care –a topic few families seem to get around to discussing.
The end-of-life panel features Ellen Goodman, a former Boston Globe Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who co-founded The Conversation Project, a Boston-based enterprise that spurs end-of-life discussions and provides resources to ease the process.
Goodman is passionate about the subject – Globe stories about her new Project have been popular with readers – and if anyone can interject humor in this topic, it is Goodman.
Those who attend the Saturday panel – the drive toward earlier Alzheimer’s treatment – will learn about first-of-its kind research being led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital scientists in Boston to test whether drugs can hold off Alzheimer’s in people who have no symptoms of the illness, but who have an abnormal protein in their brains believed to be a marker of the disease.