This piece in the NY Times by a geriatrician is nicely done. As someone who is older and will be hitting those geriatric years sooner than I might like, the cruel ageist attitudes we’ve seen in recent days is more than a little bit depressing. I realize that Joe Biden is in the most high pressure difficult job in the world and we all have a perfect right to be concerned about his ability to handle it. (I only wish everyone was as concerned about his opponent’s obvious intellectual and character deficiencies.) I think this is a sensitive analysis of what may be going on with Biden: I’m a geriatrician, a physician whose specialty is the care of older adults. I watched the debate and saw what other viewers saw: a president valiantly trying to stand up for his record and for his nation but who seemed to have declined precipitously since the State of the Union address he gave only a few months earlier. As a country, we are not having a complete or accurate discussion of age-related debility. I know no specifics — and won’t speculate here — about Mr. Biden’s clinical circumstances. But in the face of so much confused conjecture, I think it’s important to untangle some of the misunderstanding around what age-related decline may portend. Doing so requires understanding a well-characterized but underrecognized concept: clinical frailty. As we age, everyone accumulates wear and tear, illness and stress. We can all expect to occasionally lose a…