Letting Go
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left...People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. ... Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala - via Publish2 (Health), New Yorker, miker1717 (t), Joey Baker (t), Mark Pegrum (t), Gil Sharon (t), barbara trummpinski-roberts (t), David Fox (f), avivao (f), Shams Kazi (f), Kaizar Campwala (f), Subramanya Sastry (f), Jon Mitchell (f), Jeremy Caplan (f), Fabrice Florin (f), Gian Antelles (f), Joe Bonner (f), David K. Miller (f), Tiffany Hebb (f), Phylora Uppman (f)
As I proceeded through pages 1 - 8, I displayed the biases expected from my training as a family physician, noting that, as usual, Dr. Gawand, a specialist, was writing nothing about the importance of a primary care physician who knew the patient and the patient's family. On page 9, the primary care physician came in and saved the day, sort of. At least he made the end easier than it might have been. With my primary care bias, I think that the story could have been much more effective if there had been a discussion of a patient managed primary by a family physician who had known both the patient and the patient's family for years AND had been trained in end-of-life care and if there had been the perspective of a family physician included throughout. Still, this is better than what I have read from Dr. Gawande in the past.