Houston geriatrician at UTHealth was an advocate for elder health care
Dr. Carmel Dyer was always a phone call away.
“No matter how much she has done with institutes and consortiums, what her patients will remember is she would always give them her cellphone,” said Dr. Jessica Lee, assistant professor of geriatric and palliative medicine at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. “They would call her at any time, and she would help them.”
Dyer, an advocate for elder health care and a geriatric and palliative care physician, died Tuesday. She was 62.
She was the executive director of the UTHealth Consortium on Aging, which fosters collaboration among six schools in the UT system, and includes more than 200 professionals from various medical specialties and organizations working together to enrich the lives of senior citizens.
Dyer dedicated her career to preventing elder abuse by training a new generation of geriatricians and expanding access to specialized health care for older adults.
She grew up in Florida and worked as a physicians assistant before going to medical school, Lee said. As an assistant, she ran across older people who were being treated by the same doctors as 25-year-olds.
“There are differences in how you should treat an older patient medically and diagnosis-wise,” Lee said. “She saw that as an injustice, and it was one of her driving factors.”
Lee was a senior in high school when she first met Dyer in 2000. She read a Houston Chronicle article about geriatric medicine and was fascinated by the subject, so she emailed her.
“She was happy to have me shadow her, follow her around and see what it was that she did,” Lee remembered. “In my college years, I would come back to Houston and work with her every summer. She showed me everything about geriatrics, from inpatient and outpatient clinics, house calls, working in a nursing home or rehabilitation facilities. It was a really broad introduction to how geriatrics can cover so many things.”
Fourteen years after their first meeting, Dyer welcomed Lee as a faculty staff member at UTHealth. “She always held a spot open for me,” Lee said.
In the mid-1990s, Dyer worked to establish the Texas Elder Abuse and Mistreatment Institute, which works with state and local agencies, like Adult Protective Services, to conduct medical assessments.
In 2007, Dyer became the first director of the Division of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine at McGovern Medical School. In this role, she oversaw the design of inpatient and outpatient geriatric and palliative medicine programs for Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center and Harris Health Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.
Later, Dyer was tasked with leading and growing the UTHealth Consortium on Aging, which focuses on elder abuse research and expanded health care access for older adults. And in 2010, Dyer became the first medical director of the UT Physicians Center for Healthy Aging.
Before Lee became a doctor, she worked with Dyer on a pilot study to examine the severity of self-neglect by older adults. This particular area was a passion for Dyer, Lee said.
“It was almost a taboo topic, but she was just determined to do research on it,” Lee said. “A large proportion of mistreatment cases are self-neglect, and no one had really heard of it or was doing anything about it.”
A hospital dedicated to geriatric medicine, like a Texas Children’s Hospital for older adults, was one of Dyer’s hopes, and Lee hopes that dream will be realized in the future.
“She didn’t have children, so her colleagues and I would joke that geriatrics is really her baby,” Lee said. “She always thought this was an underserved area that needed to have more people doing research.”
In Dyer’s memory, the university is establishing the Carmel Bitondo Dyer, M.D., Chair in Geriatric and Palliative Medicine.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Dyer worried about her elderly patients who became more isolated in quarantine. She said many had begun opening up about feelings of loneliness and depression, which is not typical of many older Americans.
Senior citizens typically suffer in silence, Dyer said last April. They are much less likely to go to therapy than younger adults because they can be headstrong in their resilience, she said.
“We figured this would be hardest on our patient population, but this has compounded that propensity toward depression and loneliness,” Dyer said. “I point out if they’re this age — 80 or 90 — they’ve lived through the Depression, post-Depression, WWII, economic ups and downs. They’re resilient because of that. They made it through that, and they will make it through this, as well.”
Friends and family are invited to a visitation from 5 to 8 p.m. May 9 at Bradshaw Carter Funeral Home, 1734 W. Alabama. Rosary will be recited at 6:30 p.m.
A funeral Mass will be at 10 a.m. May 10 at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, 6800 Buffalo Speedway. Burial will be private.
In lieu of flowers, Dyer’s family requests donations to UTHealth, 7000 Fannin, Suite 1200 in Houston. The donations will benefit the Carmela and Salvatore Bitondo Graduate Fellowship in Elder Mistreatment. Donations also can be made online at giving.uth.edu/memorial.