Joel C.

Geerling

MD, PhD

Joel Geerling is a clinician-scientist, working in the neurology clinic while spending the majority of his time on laboratory experiments with the hopes of someday improving treatment options for patients with neurologic diseases that affect the mind and body.

In the clinic, he sees and cares for patients with cognitive symptoms – problems with memory, language, knowledge, and behavior. The underlying problems sometimes include neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's, frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), or dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), but frequently involve sleep disorders, strokes, and other vascular diseases, seizures, infections, psychiatric factors, sedating medications, and more.

His goal is to arrive at an accurate diagnosis, so he can provide you and your primary care physician with the best possible cognitive neurologic treatment recommendations. In some cases, this process will require additional tests and one or more additional clinic visits across a period of several months up to a year or longer. Sometimes, one visit is enough for a diagnosis and treatment plan.

His primary mission is to provide you with accurate information based on the best available clinical science, including the best evidence-based options for improving your cognition and well-being, no matter what the diagnosis. As new treatments appear in the future, for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, DLB, or FTD, these will be incorporated, but in the meantime, an accurate diagnosis is critical for avoiding potentially harmful treatments that will not work and trying the best available treatments for you.

He spent most of his life in the Midwest (outside St. Louis), but much of his training in the Northeastern U.S. before moving to Iowa in late 2016.