COMMENTS AND RESPONSES Dialogue on Geriatrics: How Should We Fix the Problem?

is terminally ill and make a case to restructure training by reallocat-ing resources from fellowship training to teaching initiatives to “gerontologize ” medical students and nongeriatricians. We would counter that geriatrics is very much alive and that the fellowship-trained geriatricians have accomplished much of what Golden and colleagues propose. Academic geriatrics was started in recent decades by nongeriatricians who saw a need to improve the health care of seniors through research, education, and program in-novation. They developed fellowship programs to train physicians to lead this movement. The care of seniors has been enriched by this growing number of fellowship-trained geriatricians. Two points exemplify these accomplishments. First, the geria-trization of students and nongeriatricians has been ongoing for years with support of foundations, the U.S. Department of Veterans Af-fairs, and the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health. The impact of geriatricians has been magnified greatly by training many nongeriatrician scholars who have won career devel-opment awards in geriatrics, such as those named for the late leader