Sandeep Juahar spoke to NPF Long-Term Care Crisis Reporting fellows in Washington, D.C., Oct. 2, 2023 about “Dementia Caregivers Face Knowledge, Resource Gap.”

A practicing cardiologist, Sandeep Jauhar is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He has appeared frequently on National Public Radio, CNN, and MSNBC to discuss issues related to medicine, and his essays have also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Slate.

He has written several books. His first book, “Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation,” was a national bestseller and was optioned by NBC for a dramatic television series.

His second book, “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician,” released in August 2014, was a New York Times bestseller and was named a New York Post Best Book of 2014. It was praised as “highly engaging and disarmingly candid” by The Wall Street Journal, “beautifully written and unsparing” by The Boston Globe, and “extraordinary, brave and even shocking” by The New York Times.

“Heart: A History” tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. It has been praised as “gripping…(and) strange and captivating” by The New York Times, “fascinating” by The Washington Post, “poignant and chattily erudite” by The Wall Street Journal, and “elegiac” by The American Scholar.

“My Father’s Brain” is a memoir of his relationship with his father, especially during the last stage of his father’s life, as he succumbed to dementia, but it is also a book about the brain and memory and the history and science of brain degeneration. In the book, Jauhar sets his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding his father’s disease.

The book relates the complications that arise when family members must become caregivers, as well as the bonds of siblings—and the testing of those bonds. Though the conflicts are personal, they are also in many ways universal—conversations and conflicts that every family facing the mental erosion of an elder has. At the same time, the book explores everything from the history of ancient Greece to the most cutting-edge neurological―and bioethical―research. It delves into what happens in the brain as we age and our memory falters, how memory gives meaning to our lives, even as it changes with time, how dementia complicates our understanding of what it means to have a self — and what all this means for patients, their families, and society at large.