Caring for the frail elderly, Geriatrics, was not David Stern’s first area of medical expertise. For thirty years, he worked as a gastroenterologist and internist, and then he retired. But concerns he had been feeling for some years about the differences between the bodies and minds of people as they aged, and the problems he observed as his own mother-in-law was bounced from specialist to specialist with little coherent oversight and coordination, inspired him to apply to UCLA’s Geriatric Medicine training program. Never mind that he would be older than many of his teachers. He was open to learning and had ideas about patient care that had been waiting quietly to be applied, as he kept busy with his endoscopes. His return to the practice of medicine as a consultant in geriatric care has been a blessing for the patients who come to him for evaluation; their doctors are inevitably grateful for his input as he keeps an eye on the complex care of people whose bodies may be changing rapidly, whose minds are not what they once were, whose medications multiply and overlap in confusing array.

Dr. Stern is a graduate of Columbia and SUNY Downstate Medical School in New York. His internal medicine and gastroenterology training continued at UCLA and Wadsworth/West LA Veterans Hospital, followed by two years in the Air Force, and then private practice. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology and Geriatric Medicine. Intellectually and medically prepared to deal with aging patients who suffer a wide variety of medical problems, he is also wise and warm and supportive, qualities that may be much harder to find than his fine medical training.

Until it closed, Dr. Stern was a medical director of S+AGE, the specialized geriatric evaluation clinic. During that time, he worked in UCLA’s Geriatric training program, demonstrating to physicians the best level of clinical care of the elderly. He was the initial director of the geriatric inpatient program at Encino Hospital and is medical director of the Silverado Calabasas Memory Care Community.

Dr. Stern has lectured extensively on many subjects related to the field of geriatrics: healthy aging, dementia disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, the aging gut, the “Golden Years.” He has served as a reviewer for geriatric medicine with the American Board of Internal Medicine and has written for the questions sections of the Geriatric Review Syllabus.