The Path of Aggressive, Futile Care

From Health Leader Media an article on what they call the elephant in the room, futile care, and what those of us watching the health care crisis unfold in the U.S. see as the number one issue, not only because of cost but because of violation of patient autonomy and well-being:

Once again, the folks at the Dartmouth Atlas Project have pointed to an elephant in the room. There the beast sits—the enormous amount of far too aggressive, painful, costly and often futile care, which too many doctors and hospitals provide during a Medicare patient's last 14 or 30 days of life.

The Dartmouth team's report, entitled Quality of End-of-Life Cancer Care for Medicare Beneficiaries: Regional and Hospital-Specific Analyses, shows the wide, and hard to explain, variation across the country in care provided in the last month or two weeks of a patients life. Its data tables look at cancer care practices within regional referral networks and specific hospitals for 235,821 end-stage cancer patients who died between 2003 and 2007.

The Atlas shows that this aggressive care was provided to patients whose type and stage of cancer predicted extremely poor prognosis, even for the short-term, and for whom such care is likely futile. Cancers like pancreatic, lung, and some types of leukemia and lymphoma were included in the analysis.

This is care that many patients would reject if they were told the truth: that there is very low probability their time spent in a hospital—often in an intensive care unit—will increase their number of days, the authors say.

In some cases, aggressive treatment with chemotherapy, endotracheal intubation, feeding tube placement and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, can hasten death, or at least severely weaken the patient and limit their ability to communicate with loved ones in the time when that's of greatest importance.

Is this what some might truly want? Some, perhaps. But for others, decidely not.

Read the entire post here.