Louise Aronson, MD, MFA
Associate Professor of Medicine
Department of Medicine,
Division of Geriatrics
University of California, San Francisco
Director, Northern California Geriatrics Education Center
Director, UCSF Pathways to Discovery Program
Director, UCSF Medical Humanities
Overview
Clinical
Research
Scholarship
Louise Aronson is a clinician-educator with passions for the care of vulnerable older adults, medical education, and writing. She is Associate Professor and Director of the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center, the Pathways to Discovery Program, and UCSF Medical Humanities. She is also an expert in reflective learning, a fiction writer with a book forthcoming from Bloomsbury, and a co-editor of the JAMA Care of the AGING Patient Series. She is developing a new field called public medical communication to train health professionals to more effectively tell the stories of health and health care.
Louise decided to become a doctor while working with refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border. She is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard Medical School, and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers . She trained in Primary Care Internal Medicine and Geriatrics at UCSF, and later completed the Teaching Scholars Program and the Medical Education Research Fellowship. Louise is a member of the Academy of Medical Educators and the recipient of teaching and mentorship awards, a Geriatric Academic Career Award, a Hellman Award, the Cooke Award for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and an Edward D. Harris Professionalism Award. While it’s probably true that she does too many things, she loves her work.
Clinical Activities
Louise practices in the UCSF Housecalls Program which provides primary care and palliative care to frail homebound elders throughout San Francisco. Dedicated to working with underserved populations, she primarily cares for patients in the Mission, Bernal Heights, Bayview, Hunter’s Point, Excelsior and Visitation Valley districts.
During her career, Dr. Aronson has provided primary care and geriatrics consultations to older adults in outpatient, hospice, skilled nursing and hospital settings. She speaks Spanish and French well and has some small understanding of Khmer and Russian.
Louise's research has three areas of focus:
1. Critical Reflection- Reflection enables health professionals to identify and address professional challenges and continue learning throughout their careers. Louise’s research in this area seeks to find best practices for teaching reflection, methods for evaluating reflective ability, and ways of linking reflection to outcomes for physicians and, ultimately, patients.
2. Geriatrics education- Louise develops and evaluates geriatrics training programs with the goal of determining the most effective ways of increasing the geriatrics competence of trainees and practicing clinicians from all specialties and health professions.
3. Public medical communication- Louise coined this term which defines an area of expertise in medicine focused on clear and compelling communication with the public about health and health care. Public medical communication appears in perspectives, narrative or creative arts sections of medical journals but serves an even more important role when it reaches a non-medical audience through articles in newspapers and magazines, postings on websites and blogs, commentary by television doctors, and books for the lay public. Louise is developing this field through writings, faculty trainings, and creation of innovative curricula.
Scholarship Selected Academic Publications
Aronson L., Landefeld CS. Examining older people for carotid bruits: listen to your patient, not to her neck. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 13(2):140-1, 1998.
Aronson L. Medical Linguistics. Journal of General Internal Medicine 2007 22(12);1781.
Aronson L., Chittenden E, O’Sullivan P. A Faculty Development Workshop in Teaching Reflection, Medical Education, 2009;43(5):499.
Aronson L., Osler, Plutarch and the Intimate Observation of Human Behavior. In: LaCombe M (Ed.). Osler’s Bedside Library: Great Literature from a Great Physician. Philadelphia: ACP Press, 2009.
Aronson L. Why Geriatrics? Annals of Internal Medicine 2010;152:61.
Aronson L, Niehaus B, DeVries C, Siegel J, O’Sullivan P. Do Writing and Storytelling Skill Influence Assessment of Reflective Ability in Medical Students’ Written Reflections? Academic Medicine 2010; 85(10): S29-S32.
Aronson L. 12 Tips for Teaching Reflection at All Levels of Medical Education. Medical Teacher. 2011;33(3):200-5.
O‘Sullivan, P., Aronson, L., Chittenden, E., Niehaus, B., Learman, L., (2010). Reflective Ability Rubric and User Guide. MedEdPORTAL
Aronson L, Niehaus B, Lindow J, Robertson P, O’Sullivan P. Development and Pilot Testing of a Reflective Learning Guide for Medical Education. Med Teach. 2011;33(10):e515-21.
Selected Public Medical Writing
Aronson L. The Fear of Losing Who We Are. San Francisco Chronicle, November 28, 1999.
Aronson L. A City Full of the Hidden Homebound. San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1999.
Aronson L. After. New Millennium Writings, Summer 2008.
Aronson L. Twenty-Five Things I Know. Sonora Review, Issue #54, Fall 2008.
Aronson L. Symptoms. Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2008.
Aronson L. Blurred Boundary Disorder. Northwest Review, Fall 2008.
Aronson L. Fires and Flat Lines. Fourteen Hills, Vol. 15.1, Winter 2009.
Aronson L. Survival Skills. Yellow Medicine Review. Fall 2009.
Aronson L. Giving Good Death. Seattle Review, Vol. XXX No.2, 2010.
Aronson L. A History of the Present Illness. New York: Bloomsbury USA. February 2013.
Contact
Office Address:
3333 California Street, Suite 380
UCSF Box 1265
San Francisco, CA 94143-1265
