Comments on: The Cost of Dying
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- As a retired board certified family Doctor, I was grateful to read this last article. Many times I experienced caring concerned families coming together with their family Doc, to discuss and plan the final days of their loved ones life. Our small local hospital was not expensive, but whenever possible, home care was the most frequent request of the family.
I was never accused of rationing care, but we did work together putting all the facts on the table, and most of all doing what would give the patient the relief of pain, the preservation of dignity, and the respect they had asked of me, when they had to choose machine assisted existence, vs peaceful pain free exit from this life. My father told me repeatedly, if you ever force me to stay alive, when I reach the point of being a burden to my family, I will return from the grave and eternally haunt you. He did reach that point, and we the family did let him go peacefully, and free fo pain. - Reply to this comment
- Script refers to the futile ICU treatments as 'prolonging life'. Good MDs undertand the procedures are simply 'prolonging death'.
Good MDs will tell the truth. - Reply to this comment
- One of the very first assumptions, in my view, is very wrong and that is 75% of patients wish to die at home. The research behind this statistic is fraught with problems because most of the research is provider structured questionnaires. If you simply ask the public and many patients the question if they wish to die at home, the answer is yes. That is until the actual time presents itself and the reality is quite different from the assumption. How many times is it said that patients and families do not enter palliative-hospice care (the one word comprehensive philosophy) until it is too late? One of the reasons, not appreciated, is that we have not understood what it really means to die at home. For some it works but for many situations, cancer, place families in the positions of being doctors and nurses and psychologists all at the same time....not to mention trying to keep their daily lives somewhat on track. I just have seen too many families destroyed by trying to have their family members die at home. In part, it is often a displacement of care on to families for cost savings and at what expense? We see great family comments on how good it was that their family member could die at home. More attention is required to elicit actual details of why patients did not wish to or could not die at home.
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- Cancer care is the largest segment of what is laughably called "healthcare" in America. Medicine has organized itself into a monopoly. Until we dismantle this monopoly we are doomed. Increasingly, we see our friends and family members dying of cancer after devastating treatments feared more than the disease itself. Why? Because we don't know what works. We do not evaluate treatments for safety, efficacy and cost effectiveness. We are losing the war on cancer. More people are diagnosed and more people are dying. As a nation we can not afford to overlook any alternatives for any reason.
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- Steve Kroft, If the main problem with America's healthcare lies in the last 20 days , fix that problem don't destroy the entire system because stupid people don't understand their options !!!!
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