Geriatric Physician Laurie Archbald, MD 

Laurie Archbald, MD, is a geriatric physician treating older adults and focusing on their needs. Not only does she ask the right questions to help her patients, but she likes to get the family members involved. She is passionate about advocating for her patients and working together for their best health goals.
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I’m Laurie Archbald, and I am a doctor in geriatric medicine. One of the great parts of geriatrics is that we get to be a primary care provider or a consultant. We can focus on a variety of geriatric conditions like polypharmacy.
As we age, we tend to accumulate diagnoses and medications, so we can help to review those medications to see if they’re all still needed. In addition, we focus on function. How’s somebody doing? Are they falling? Are they having difficulty with daily activities? And those are things that we can go through. In addition, cognition. Is anybody having difficulty with their memory? Is that normal aging memory, or is it more complex than that? Those are the things that we sort through in geriatrics.
The most rewarding part of my job is getting to know, not just my patients, but also their families. And understanding how their families work together, what their goals are, and helping them achieve their goals, both in health and in life.
At our initial visits, we get to know our patient. Often, they’ll come with family members, so we’ll get to know the family as well. Understanding the social environment is really important. Who do they live with? How are things working? We’ll go through medications, different medical conditions, hospitalizations, the standard internal medicine stuff, as well as their function and their cognition. There’s a lot that we go through in that first initial visit.
I’m passionate about helping people, especially our geriatric patients that can be vulnerable in our medical system and have complex needs. I’m passionate about helping them, to be their advocate, to make sure that we’re working together for their health goals, and to really get the quality of life that they’re looking for.