1. Doctors such as geriatricians and psychiatrists have been cast in the role of fixers and gatekeepers to protect the institutions.

2. To a geriatrician, though, it is a medical problem.

3. Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University, said, "He doesn't make too many mistakes."

4. Geriatrician Dosa with Oscar. "I learned to watch him and to listen to him, " says the doctor.

5. At UCLA, geriatrician and researcher Gail Greendale has just begun a second yoga study with seniors to try to figure out what poses work best for the older body.

6. David Dosa, MD, a geriatrician since 2003, lives in Barrington, Rhode Island. (He has changed most of the names here for privacy.

7. Bill Thomas, for example, is a geriatrician who calls himself a ''nursing home abolitionist'' and built the first Green Houses in Tupelo, Miss.

8. He was in medical school, studying to be a geriatrician.

9. In its place, doctors like Dennis McCullough, a family physician and geriatrician at Dartmouth Medical School, suggest "slow medicine" — as he puts it, "a family-centered, less expensive way."