Learn, Embrace, Age Well
Books & Publications
This collectins highlights my published work as well as projects currently in development. My writing is an extension of my clinical practice — grounded in real-world geriatrics, focused on function, independence, and quality of life, and written to help patients, families, and professionals better understand the aging experience. As new chapters of research, reflection, and teaching continue to unfold, this page will grow to include future books and related publications.
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Life, Love, and the In-Between
Life, Love, and the In Between is a physician's deeply human exploration of what it means to live fully, love fiercely, and face the inevitability of loss with grace. As a geriatrician who has spent her career sitting beside the dying-listening, learning, and bearing witness-Dr. Golnosh Sharafsaleh has come to see that the wisdom we need to survive life's hardest moments already exists in those who have walked through them.
The Health Framework
The HEALTH Framework is a practical model I use every day in clinical practice to evaluate and improve a patient’s healthspan. It brings together the major domains that determine function, independence, and well-being as we age – Health Systems, Energy, Activity, Longevity, Transformation, and Habits. Each domain represents a lens through which I assess a patient’s needs and design a comprehensive care plan. No single element is more important than another. Together, they form a whole-person approach to aging that is realistic, evidence-based, and grounded in day-to-day medicine.
Life, Love, and the In-Between
Life, Love, and the In Between is a physician's deeply human exploration of what it means to live fully, love fiercely, and face the inevitability of loss with grace. As a geriatrician who has spent her career sitting beside the dying-listening, learning, and bearing witness-Dr. Golnosh Sharafsaleh has come to see that the wisdom we need to survive life's hardest moments already exists in those who have walked through them.
When her infant son, James, was born with a congenital heart defect and died eight weeks later, her world shattered. Yet in the quiet ache that followed, she realized something unexpected: years spent caring for her patients through illness, aging, and death had prepared her for her own grief. And after his loss, it was again her patients who taught her how to live.
This memoir weaves together lessons learned from both sides of medicine-doctor and mother, healer and human being. Through intimate, often profound patient stories, Life, Love, and the In Between reveals how aging, illness, and loss are not simply tragedies to endure but passages that illuminate what it means to be alive. Each chapter explores a universal truth: the power of love, the meaning found in the in-between moments, the necessity of transparency, the work of compassion, the courage of adaptation, and the rediscovery of relevance when life changes beyond recognition.
Dr. Sharafsaleh shows that meaning does not fade with age or decline; it deepens. Her patients taught her that relevance is not defined by productivity or youth, but by connection, kindness, and presence. Medicine at its best, she reveals, is not transactional-it is relational, rooted in listening and honoring the human story behind every diagnosis.
Life, Love, and the In Between is not just a memoir about medicine; it is a meditation on mortality, resilience, and the sacredness of time. It asks what it means to live with purpose in a world that prizes doing over being, perfection over presence. And it reminds us that the purpose of life is not to avoid pain, but to grow through it.
At its heart, this book is an invitation-to slow down, to listen, to seek wisdom from those who have lived longer and loved harder, and to rediscover the extraordinary beauty of our shared humanity. Because what truly matters, in the end, is not how loudly we live, but how deeply we love-in life, in loss, and in the in between.
The HEALTH Framework
What’s Coming Next: The Art of HEALTHspan
After years of walking alongside patients through aging, illness, recovery, and loss, I began asking a different question.
Not only what gives life meaning,
but how do we protect the biology that allows us to live it well?
My next book, The Art of HEALTHspan, is a structured exploration of how we age and how we preserve capacity across time.
It is not a wellness manual.
It is not an anti-aging guide.
It is a systems-based framework grounded in gerontology, geriatrics, and lifestyle medicine.
HEALTH is organized into six core domains:
H – Health Systems
What aging actually is.
How organ systems change, how complexity accumulates, and how reserve is built and lost.
E – Energy
The body’s capacity to generate and deploy fuel.
Sleep, metabolic resilience, stress physiology, and why fatigue is never “just tiredness.”
A – Activity
Function as the true measure of health.
Mobility, strength, gait speed, frailty, and why movement predicts healthspan more than almost anything else.
L – Longevity
Risk, reserve, and time.
Cardiometabolic health, cognitive durability, hormonal transitions, and prevention as a decades-long process.
T – Transformation
Clinical and psychosocial adaptation.
How people recalibrate when diagnoses emerge, function shifts, or roles change.
H – Habits
The daily drivers that sustain capacity.
Nutrition, sleep, movement, stress modulation, social engagement, and the Reset framework for when life disrupts routine.
The book moves from biology to function to risk to adaptation to execution.
It reframes aging not as decline to be feared, nor optimization to be chased, but as a longitudinal process that can be understood, respected, and influenced.
The goal is not to live forever.
It is to preserve capacity, protect identity, and remain engaged across the full arc of life.