Aparna Pujar: Caregivers and professional caregivers alike are being asked to do more with less time, less support and more complexity than ever. AI is starting to change what is possible, but only when caregivers know how to use it well and where to draw the line. In this episode, we explore how AI can support caregiving without replacing the judgment, trust and connection at its center. This is AI-Powered Caregiving by Zemplee, the podcast exploring how technology is reshaping the way we care for older adults.

I’m Aparna Pujar, the founder and CEO of Zemplee. Today we’re talking about how AI can support both family and professional caregivers. Our guest today is Dr. Irina Koyfman. She’s a doctor of nursing practice, dementia specialist and one of the first board-certified AI clinicians in the country. She has more than 25 years of clinical and executive healthcare experience, and she has lived this work personally, caring for her aging parents and grandparents while raising her two daughters.

She’s the author of the AI Health Companion and the Sandwich Generation Handbook, and she writes and speaks about helping caregivers and clinicians use AI as a trustworthy thinking partner, not a replacement for judgment. I’m really excited to have Dr. Irina here. Irina, welcome to the show.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Aparna Pujar: Before we start, why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, who you are and what your journey has been?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Sure, thank you. Long story short, I came to America in 1992 at the very vulnerable age of 17. I immigrated with my whole family — there’s only seven of us. I wanted to be a singer. I thought that Barbra Streisand was going to retire because Irina is here. Then very quickly I learned that singing might be a challenging profession.

I think any immigrant probably knows that it’s very scary to come to a new country and then be told that the thing you love is not going to make money. So the American Dream had to change really quickly. I was told to go into medicine because that’s where the insurance and the paycheck were. And by the way, I had no concept of what insurance is, but I knew that I needed it. So I went to community college and started taking English as a second language.

Long story short, I became a nurse, a nurse practitioner, a doctor of nursing practice. Through my journey, I love learning and I love sharing. So I’ve been getting education in everything that I personally had to deal with. For example, when my father was diagnosed with dementia, I wanted to study dementia really in depth, because as nurses and nurse practitioners we only get very little. Unless you work in neurology, you don’t really get a chance to manage people with dementia. So I did that. And then recently, when AI came into place, I was like, oh my gosh, I need to learn from the best. So I got board certified in AI in medicine, and then I wrote multiple books. I’m going to come up for air and have you ask questions.

I have been clinically practicing, but I’m also multi-passionate about so many things. And because I was a caregiver, and still am, I was kind of thrown into caregiving. I think it’s like anybody who speaks English as a second language: if you’re in healthcare, you become a caregiver to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a dental hygienist, a physical therapist or a doctor, your whole family is going to say, you understand more than I do, so come and translate. So that’s kind of my journey.

Aparna Pujar: Wow, thank you for sharing that. It seems like you’ve had an exciting 25 years since you came here.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Actually, thirty-something, but yeah.

Aparna Pujar: Great. So let’s dive in. You are one of the first board-certified AI clinicians in the country, but you’re also a nurse, a daughter whose father had dementia, and you’ve been in the sandwich generation. How did these two identities, clinician and caregiver, end up merging into your line of work?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I think it’s very hard to think about them as separate paths that people choose. When we live our life, everything is so intertwined, and one kind of bleeds into another. I will never forget when I was running a really high-pressure job, overseeing 300 clinicians. My girls were a high schooler and a middle schooler, and my father was diagnosed with dementia. Meanwhile, my grandmother, who died a few days before she turned 100, had to be put on hospice. Everything was just crazy. I was in a meeting, somebody must have asked me what happened, and she said, you’re the perfect sandwich generation.

And I was like — English as a second language — what’s a sandwich generation? I’d never heard of that concept. She explained that it’s when you’re taking care of your children but also your family members. It doesn’t have to be parents; it can be grandparents. I actually had a disabled uncle I was the sole caregiver for, because he was never married, he had no children, and he was born with developmental delays. He was always my uncle, but he was like my child that I was taking care of.

Everything was going so fast. I also remember when I learned about the mind-body connection in nursing school, I was blown away. I was like, oh my gosh, of course mind and body are connected. We shouldn’t think psychology or psychiatry is neck up and everything else is body. But then, further down the road, I was like, wait, there is no mind-body connection, because we’re all one organism. It’s like saying nail-to-eye connection, or hair-to-heart connection. This is all you. So this is why I became so passionate about understanding what I can do to help people in the sandwich generation, the caregivers. When everything was said and done and all of my family members who were sick passed away — and thank God I have what I call a young and healthy mother — and my kids are older now, one has finished law school, one just went to college, I wanted to do something for caregivers.

So I sat down and wrote a book that I called the Sandwich Generation Handbook. It’s very short, divided into 18 small chapters, so when you’re so busy like I was and you’re struggling — maybe your biggest issue is time management — you can just open that chapter. It’s a few pages, and I go through: here’s the problem that we all have, here’s my personal story. A lot of them are very funny, because when you’re a caregiver, if you don’t laugh, you’re going to cry. The tears are going to come anyway, so you might as well have tears of laughter. So, my personal story and then resources, and all of the resources in the book are free, so anybody can use them.

One of the chapters was on AI, because by that time AI was already — not like it is now, but last year people were already talking about it. Every time I talked to somebody about my book and they learned I had a chapter on AI, everybody said, we need more on AI. And to be honest with you, I now forgot your question because I got so passionate answering this.

Aparna Pujar: No, you’re doing great. I think you answered my question really well.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Now I remember. You asked how things blended into one life. As caregivers, we don’t have a choice. You’re not swimming in two or three separate lanes in the pool. It’s one big pool, and sometimes you have to go this way, and sometimes you have one straight path. That’s how it connected for me.

Aparna Pujar: Thank you for sharing that. One takeaway for me: I never knew that clinicians thought anything above the neck is psychiatry and anything below the neck is not. That is really funny the way you said it, and I’m going to remember it, because I come from India and the mind-body connection is so integral to how we think about ourselves. You’re seeing that happen in yoga and other things now. But it’s interesting to know that the medical world thinks very differently about this.

I do relate with your story. I’m a sandwich generation caregiver as well. I was caring for my aging parents, who were in India, and my kids, who were here. So I can completely relate to what you must have gone through, although I think your situation was way more complex. I’m not a clinician, so I had the luxury of not knowing the intricate details. You would know everything — clinically, psychologically, socially, emotionally.

So you have a book, the AI Health Companion, and you write about trusting AI completely, getting burned by a confident wrong answer, and learning to trust but verify. Walk us through that. What was that experience like?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Oh my God. I think one of the powerful examples in my book, and how I started, shows how people should think about AI. There was a little boy — a complicated story — who was almost dying. It was right when ChatGPT had just started. Nobody could diagnose him; he was really fading away. His mom put all of his medical history into ChatGPT, and ChatGPT came up with a possible diagnosis, a very rare one. I don’t even remember the disease — it’s in my book — but a very rare pediatric disease. She took the paperwork, made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon and discussed what AI had provided. He did a few more tests and confirmed the diagnosis. The boy was operated on, and it saved his life. He’s now a thriving nine-year-old.

On the flip side, there was a man who asked ChatGPT for an alternative to salt, or sodium, because he wanted to get his blood pressure in check. ChatGPT gave him the idea of using sodium bromide, which is actually poison. A few days later, he ended up in the emergency room with psychosis.

So those are the two things people always need to understand about AI: it can save your life, and it can possibly kill you. When I came into AI, I was on the side of, I trust it because it’s AI — everything AI gives me is going to be fantastic. This was before my board certification. I was writing a paper to be published through my work, and ChatGPT had just come out. I put the paper I wrote myself, with all the graphs and all of my references, through ChatGPT and said: check spelling and grammar, what could you change, what doesn’t make sense. It came back with a very good version of my paper and some really good feedback — maybe this should go here, the conclusion should be a little tighter.

I read it, took some suggestions and not others, and sent it in for publication. Then the editor asked me, “Did you use AI?” I said yes, just to go through it. I never write with AI; I always write and then have AI check it. She said, “But Irina, seven out of your 11 references are completely wrong.” And I pull my own references — I have a doctorate degree. I was like, what? I compared what I sent her to my last version. What AI did is what’s called hallucination. It literally just changed my references, and we don’t know why. I wasn’t clear enough. I didn’t know at that time to say, do not make any changes, do not touch my references. I was mortified. But I explained to her what happened: I didn’t check the references because I didn’t think AI would do this to me. I sent my original, everything checked out and the paper was published. It was a really good paper, by the way. But it was my first encounter with AI hallucination. Over time, I got board certified and learned a lot more. This is where a lot of people need to know that AI should be trusted but verified.

I have a framework — it’s not mine personally, there are many — but I like the one that’s like a traffic light: green, yellow and red. When do you just trust AI? When it’s not life-threatening. For example, if I say, I’m trying to lose weight, I’m 52, I’m menopausal and I’m doing aerobic exercise, what should I add? AI would probably say, add weight-bearing exercise to your routine. My life is not going to change; I’m not going to die. That’s the kind of thing where I don’t have time to double-check, and it’s fine.

Then there’s yellow, which has to do with your diet and things that could potentially alter something in your life — like the man who asked for a low-sodium diet. That’s where you have to stop, take a pause and ask appropriate questions: show me the evidence, where did you get this? I have so many different ways of challenging AI.

Then there is red. Red is when you have to stop and either not ask AI at all or, if you ask, learn how to ask the right question. That’s everything that has to do with diagnosis and medication. Is that the question you want to ask your doctor? If it is, that’s where you need to stop and really learn. I’m not saying don’t ask AI. We all use it. Ninety-five percent of the population uses AI as their doctors and lawyers right now. But you need to understand: could this alter my life? What kind of questions do I need to ask? How do I push back? And where do I draw the line and say, I’m not taking that advice?

Aparna Pujar: Wow, that is fascinating. So, to recap: always tell AI to double-check the references, and don’t ask it for a recipe that has sodium bromide in it.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: That’s a good one. But I think it’s really more about this. I don’t know if you remember, Aparna, but when AI first came to market there were a lot of jobs called prompt engineers — a job created for somebody who understands how to ask AI a question. Now, four years into AI, people pretty much understand what to ask and how. If you Google prompt engineering, I don’t think those jobs exist anymore. But it’s so important to understand how to ask questions and how to use AI for your benefit. I go in depth in the book. You either need to choose one tool and possibly pay some money, because the free version runs out very quickly, or you use three or four free versions. But then you have to learn how to ask questions and how to introduce yourself.

Did you know that you have to introduce yourself to AI? I would say 90% of people don’t know that. AI is an algorithm that predicts your next question. If ChatGPT has no idea who you are and you ask, are cats friendly, it’ll assume you mean to humans and give you an answer. That’s very different from saying, I’m a student learning zoology, versus I’m looking for a cat to adopt. Every AI has a free “about you” section. I write, this is me. Sometimes I paste my resume into it, just so AI understands more. And I say, I like your answers to be clear, concise and always referenced. Show me what you think. And then you also have to learn how to push back.

Aparna Pujar: It’s fascinating how you say that. I think you’ll relate to this: we are the generation that has gone from Google search to prompts. We’ve built up knowledge of how to get these engines to give you the answers you want — not in a negative way, but how to make them do what you want them to do for you.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I would say, how to train them to actually give you the answers.

Aparna Pujar: I personally feel like my prompting skills have improved so much. Zemplee never started with OpenAI. We built our AI platform from the ground up, because when we started we couldn’t trust the platforms that were out there, and I think they’re still not trustworthy for healthcare applications. We proceed very cautiously. We have started integrating a little with both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI, but very selectively: we judge every response and keep tweaking. Ninety percent of our effort goes into tweaking the prompts rather than just taking what they give. On the positive side, they’re improving. The more people use them, I feel like they’ll start curating better responses with less hallucination.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I always tell people, if it’s something important — and in my book, the AI Health Companion, I give about 50 example prompts, like how to ask about your labs or your medical history — I tend to say to any AI I’m using: now assume that everything you told me is wrong, and provide feedback on what you told me. So many times it’ll say, oh my gosh, yes, this was wrong and that was wrong. We all have to learn how to push back. And don’t buy into how kind and cute AI is. Every time I say, no, check this again, this is wrong, I know for sure, it says, “Irina, thank you so much for pointing that out. You are absolutely correct.” Sometimes I say, don’t kiss my ass, be very direct with me.

So that’s important too. It’s built to be very, very compassionate, with emotional intelligence. But what it has done is give people a false sense of security — that AI is so kind, it would never lie to me. Well, wrong. Just because it’s kind doesn’t mean it won’t lie to you.

Aparna Pujar: That’s fantastic. I don’t know if you do this, but I play a “be my devil’s advocate” game, especially with Claude. I have fun with it because I’m testing what it’s trying to tell me. I use that with my developers as well, because it prepares me for the questions the developers are going to ask me.

All right, this is very exciting. Where do you see professional caregivers over-relying on AI in ways that worry you?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Caregivers are people, and people are people. Some will over-rely on AI for everything, and some won’t use AI at all because they don’t trust it. My goal is to help people understand how to trust but verify, and how to care for their loved ones better and more easily. For example, where I think you can and should rely on AI is medication management. If you have your medication list, it’s so easy to ask AI to organize it, to give you an Excel spreadsheet or whatever form you like, and put it on your calendar. That’s the stuff I would trust, because it’s automation. It’s not even AI; it’s just automation.

Analyzing labs is another one. I think it’s amazing. How many caregivers understand labs? Very, very few — even some nurses and doctors. I’ve never worked in cardiology, and now there are all these different cholesterols: lipoprotein little a, little b. Unless you’re in that specific space as a healthcare provider, you know enough to be dangerous, but not truly in depth. I had a skin biopsy that came back questionable, and the report was seven pages of fluff. Even I wasn’t truly understanding exactly what it was and what I needed to do. So I uploaded it into AI and said: use lay language, talk to me like I’m a 10th or 12th grade student, explain the pros and cons of the next treatment. It was so easy then to read and confirm my understanding.

I would also totally rely on it for: here’s my mom’s medical history, here are her medications, she’s seeing her primary care provider — what are the five questions I need to ask? What can I ask about possibly deprescribing some of her medications? AI is great at pulling that information together and helping you prep. Even if you come in with seven questions and only have time for three, it’s still better than coming in with nothing and being at the mercy of a clinician who may or may not address everything that needs to be addressed. So to me, it’s not about over-reliance or under-reliance. It’s about learning when to trust, when to verify, and how to make your job easier.

Aparna Pujar: That’s a fantastic insight. Out of curiosity, I’m going to switch tracks a little. As medical professionals, what are you seeing? Are patients coming into encounters better prepared, with all the tough questions they’re ready to ask? How is the medical profession looking at this? Are doctors scared, or being challenged? Are they doing their own side research on ChatGPT or Claude so they can level up with the smart patients walking into their offices?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: It’s a fantastic question, and I wish I had one answer, but clinicians, just like anybody, are people. From what I’m hearing, some doctors and nurses get really offended when patients come in with a printout from ChatGPT. Some get curious, and some actually get inspired.

My job is first to help patients understand how to ask the question. It doesn’t matter who you are — a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist or a manager at a restaurant. If somebody comes to you with a piece of paper, doesn’t look you in the eye and says, “ChatGPT told me this, what do you have to say about it?” that’s just not appropriate. So I always tell patients: remember, this is your support. You should ask AI all the questions. When you come to the doctor, you can say, “I was so interested in learning more about my mom’s diabetes, and I know you’re so busy, so I did a little bit of prep. Here’s what I found. Can you please tell me if I’m on the right track? Can you confirm or deny the findings?” Always ask a question; don’t come with a statement like, “I know my mom should not be on lisinopril because ChatGPT said so.” Then the person is going to be defensive, and that’s never a good thing. So people need to understand how to prepare and how to ask. Be curious.

And with providers, my job is to tell them: when a patient comes to you with a question AI gave them, you should feel proud. A, they trust you enough to actually ask you instead of going behind your back. B, they are really trying to take care of themselves, and they’re probably looking for validation of what they found, not trying to find something wrong. So curiosity is the name of the game. If you’re a doctor or nurse, just get curious and say, wow, that’s so awesome that you brought this. By the way, which AI are you using? Is it ChatGPT? Grok? Claude? Just to start a conversation. Then ask, what made you ask that question? Sometimes you’ll find things in the patient’s answer that mean you never have to address what ChatGPT said at all. Sometimes it’s the fear of missing out, or the fear of being wrong, and that’s what you need to address. Because if you don’t, these ChatGPT papers are going to keep coming. It’s all about us being better humans, with better connection and better communication, and just being curious.

Aparna Pujar: Thanks for sharing that. So the general answer is yes, you should go to the doctor prepared with your questions — five questions or seven.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Yes. And as a clinician, I read somewhere — I don’t have the data in front of me — that there are millions of healthcare inquiries to ChatGPT every day, just in America. We all need to understand that people are doing this, and it’s a good thing. We just need to be prepared to answer, and to look deeper into what the true question is. The question could be, “I think my mom is on too many medications and I’m trying to see what she doesn’t need to be on” — deprescribing — rather than a question about that specific medication.

Aparna Pujar: I agree with you. I was speaking at an event recently and I said that society at large is going to benefit more when people start taking an interest in their own health. Until about 10 years ago, that was much harder to do. When search engines came, we started searching for information, but we were still relying on someone out there to publish it. The convenience of ChatGPT is how it synthesizes and personalizes it for you. I rely on it. I feed it my steps per day and my blood pressure, it keeps track, and it tells me what I’m doing OK and what I’m not. That’s also the essence of how Zemplee was built. We use all the data we collect and turn it back into information and recommendations to help people thrive, which is the ultimate goal of all the information we’re collecting and processing through these AI engines.

Let’s flip back to the family caregiver situation. A lot of family caregivers, when it comes to caring for their elders, don’t even know what to ask an AI. What are the questions and situations where it actually helps, and when should someone depend on AI? From what I’ve learned about caregiving for older adults, it often starts in a state of crisis: a fall happens, or they’re admitted to the hospital, and you’re desperately trying to figure out what you can do. Would you depend on AI at a time like that, or not?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: It’s an intriguing question, because everybody is so different, Aparna. The beauty of our life right now is that we’re interconnected, but we’re also different in all of our issues. So it’s important to teach people the basics, so they can figure out for themselves why they need it, when they need it and how.

Of course, it’s always better to meet your AI friend way before any problem starts. But even if the problem starts and somebody’s hospitalized, the best thing I’ve seen AI used for is discharge instructions. I worked in readmission reduction programs, and I can tell you that so many people get readmitted because they don’t understand or don’t follow their discharge instructions. If you’ve ever been discharged, you know you often come out with a true binder of everything: here’s your disease, here’s what you were diagnosed with, here’s your current medication, here’s everything that happened to you in the hospital. It’s War and Peace — 37 pages, a hundred pages. It’s a lot.

So to make sense of it, even when you’re in the car and overwhelmed, take a picture. But I always teach people: totally black out your name, your date of birth and everything that is your PHI. What I also did not know — I made the mistake of not doing this for myself and learned it later — is that every AI tool comes pre-programmed to share your data. They’re sharing it with, say, OpenAI for ChatGPT, for training and data collection. If you’re uploading your discharge instructions, imagine you faxed them to a thousand different fax numbers with no idea who’s going to get their hands on them — somebody who wants to steal your mom’s Medicare number. So, and it’s also in my book, I tell people where to go in the AI settings and click it off, because it comes pre-programmed as on. You have to opt out. But even when you do, I still don’t trust that my information will be private. So take a second and black it out with a pen, cut it out, whatever. Discharge instructions are amazing.

Really try to start using it way before any problems, and explain to the AI who you are. And you had an excellent question about how you know what questions to ask. I would ask that to AI. I would say, I’m caregiving for my mom, who’s 76. I’m curious what questions she should ask you, ChatGPT, about her current health. Or you can say, act as a nurse in a doctor’s office: when my mom comes in, what questions should the nurse ask her before she sees the doctor? You can literally play with AI. Instead of thinking, what should I ask, say that: what questions should I ask you about my diabetes? Then keep playing with it. The more people learn how to play with AI and converse with it, the better.

A lot of people say, I’m having a hard time, I can’t really see, I can’t type that fast. Talk to it. Every AI, on the phone or the computer, has a microphone button. Talk your heart out. I use it sometimes when I remember. I was walking and needed to ask something, and I stopped and started typing, and I thought, wait, why am I typing? So I pressed the microphone, kept walking and asked the question. Just learn how to become friends with AI and keep asking the questions you would ask somebody else. Don’t know what to ask the doctor? Ask AI: what should I ask?

Aparna Pujar: That is super fascinating. We have a lot of family caregivers who listen to our show. If a family caregiver listening to this episode has never opened an AI tool for anything health-related, what’s one thing you would tell them to try this week?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: That’s a great question. If somebody has never done anything, my personal favorite right now — and it changes week by week — is Claude by Anthropic. Just Google Claude, and claude.ai will come up. Register your email. You can use it without registering, but it’s so nice if you register, get your account ready and make that introduction — about me, what I want to do. So either Claude or ChatGPT. Perplexity is great for more in-depth medical knowledge, but that’s for somebody who’s already been using AI.

If you’re really not technologically savvy, just choose one. Everybody knows ChatGPT; it’s easy, it’s open. But if you’re a little more open and curious, go to ChatGPT, go to Claude, go to Gemini by Google, and maybe even Microsoft’s — what’s the Microsoft one? Thank you, Copilot. Choose two or three, register, and ask the same question to all of them and compare the answers. Sometimes I play them against each other. Say I ask ChatGPT, what’s the best hair color for my face? Then I ask Claude the same thing. Then I switch: “Hey Claude, ChatGPT told me that honey highlights would be better.” And I do the same the other way. I really pit them against each other, and then they have to do a little more work to find the true answer. So either choose one or, my suggestion, at least two or three, and keep asking the same question. You’ll also recognize which one you like more and which one speaks closer to you. And if you use audio, it will sometimes even speak to you in your own accent or language, which is wonderful.

Aparna Pujar: That’s so funny. Yesterday I think it was Claude that started talking to me in Thai. I don’t know why. It probably thought I was searching for a Thai restaurant in the area and suddenly switched its responses to Thai, which was kind of interesting.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I love that.

Aparna Pujar: This has been a fascinating conversation. We’re almost at the end of the show, so I wanted to talk about a few other things. You said you were multi-talented, multifaceted —

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Multi-passionate.

Aparna Pujar: Multi-passionate, with a lot of interests. So what do you do outside of your work as a doctor of nursing practice?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I love to read. I’m an avid reader. I belong to multiple book clubs and lead one myself, and they’re very different: one is more spiritually inclined, one more religiously inclined, one is anything. So I read a lot. I love to cook, and I love to share. Outside of work, I do a lot of videos and information sharing on social media. And I exercise: I walk, I go to the gym, I play pickleball. It’s so vital not to forget that you shouldn’t just exercise your mind or just your body. As we discussed, this is one organism, and everything needs to be exercised in certain ways.

Aparna Pujar: Neck up, neck down. Both.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: That’s right.

Aparna Pujar: You’ve written two books. Are there any more? Tell us about that.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Two and a half — two that I wrote myself, and a third that I wrote with a nursing colleague on AI competencies for nurses. When we both became board certified, we learned that at the time there were no AI competencies for nurses. Usually you learn, say, how to put in an IV, then you show somebody you know how to do it and they check you off: yes, she’s competent. But there was nothing like that for AI. So we wrote that book together. As for what I’m working on — I think I like to speak more than I like to write. So I’m thinking of maybe starting a podcast, where I can do more talking and maybe less writing.

Aparna Pujar: Nice. Wishing you all the best, and do keep us informed when you start your podcast. We would love to participate in some way. Last but not least: if you had a magic wand and could change something about aging in America, what would it be, and why?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I actually thought about that for a while, because there are so many cliché answers my brain went to right away, with everything happening in the caregiver world right now. But what I want to bring to people’s attention is that we forgot that aging is a privilege. So many people are not privileged enough to age. They die young, and they would have loved to live. We’ve been looking at aging almost as a disease that we need to fix. I think it’s very much an American problem, looking at aging as something that should be fixed, and I think that’s wrong. We need to change our minds and say aging is a privilege. We should all enjoy the fact that we are aging and getting older. How do we enjoy it where we are, feeling healthy, happy and vital, able to do what we love to do? And stop talking about aging as a disease that needs a medication or surgery. So that’s what I would do. I would change our minds to say aging is a privilege, not a problem.

Aparna Pujar: That’s a fantastic point. Aging is a privilege, and as a society we just have to accept it, just like we accept childbirth and growth and puberty and everything else. With that, we come to the end of our program. I wish I could keep talking to you — you have such fascinating things to share, and I know you like sharing, so we’ll probably bring you back for another session.

Dr. Irina Koyfman: I would love it.

Aparna Pujar: Thank you so much for being on the show and for sharing everything you did. What’s one way for people to find out more about you and your work?

Dr. Irina Koyfman: Thank you. The easiest is to Google my name, Dr. Irina Koyfman. I have two websites. One is called Affinity Expert, and it’s more about my consulting work in healthcare. The other is sandwich-generation.org, which is more about my books and speaking engagements about being a caregiver in the sandwich generation. But I want to end with one book that I did not write. When I read it, it totally blew my mind and changed my way of thinking about aging and death. The book is called Being Mortal, by Dr. Atul Gawande. I think every person should read it, because it shows you what aging and death truly are, and helps us understand, accept and maybe even be happy when we’re taking care of people at the end of life — and truly understand whether we’re holding on to them because of our ego, because we just want one more day, versus what it truly means for them. So again, Being Mortal by Dr. Atul Gawande. Highly, highly recommend.

Aparna Pujar: Thank you for sharing that. With that, we come to the end of our podcast. That was Dr. Irina Koyfman, and we were super excited to have her on our show. We hope you’ll listen to her and reach out to her — you can Google her by name. Thank you again for listening. This is AI-Powered Caregiving by Zemplee.