“Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?”

There’s a thought-provoking article in the August 2010 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine on modern medicine being “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.”

Here are some excerpts:

* 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. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

* In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

* The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing… The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.

* It’s worth pausing to consider what had just happened. Step by step, Sara ended up on a fourth round of chemotherapy, one with a minuscule likelihood of altering the course of her disease and a great likelihood of causing debilitating side effects. An opportunity to prepare for the inevitable was forgone. And it all happened because of an assuredly normal circumstance: a patient and family unready to confront the reality of her disease.

“It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity,” [Stephen Jay Gould] wrote in his 1985 essay. “Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.”

The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do.

Two-thirds of the terminal-cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death.

“A family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation,” said Dr. Susan Block.

According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want.

And here’s a link to this terrific article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

ANNALS OF MEDICINE
LETTING GO
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
by Atul Gawande
The New Yorker
August 2, 2010

Robin