‘Slow medicine’ allows elderly to control care
May 5th, 2008From the New York Times:
A retirement community affiliated with Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire has become a laboratory for the ’slow medicine’ movement, allowing patients to put on the brakes when considering care that may have high risks and limited rewards for elderly people.
… it educates patients and families how to push back against emergency room trips and hospitalizations designed for those with treatable illnesses, not the inevitable erosion of advanced age.
Slow medicine, which shares with hospice care the goal of comfort rather than cure, is increasingly available in nursing homes, but for those living at home or in assisted living, a medical scare usually prompts a call to 911, with little opportunity to choose otherwise.
The movement is not without controversy.
Many in their 80s and 90s — and their boomer children — want to pull out all the stops to stay alive, and doctors get paid for doing a procedure, not discussing whether it should be done. The costliest patients — the elderly with chronic illnesses — are the only group with universal health coverage under Medicare, leading to huge federal expenditures that experts agree are unsustainable as boomers age.
… The chief medical officer at U.C.L.A., Dr. Tom Rosenthal, said that aggressive treatment for the elderly at acute care hospitals can be “inhumane,” and that once a patient and family were drawn into that system, “it’s really hard to pull back from it.”
With audio of residents.
From one of the comments on the piece:
The right of every aged person to control their own outcome will become THE civil rights battle of the coming decade. It will be fundamentally about ending the exploitation of the elderly by the medico-industrial complex. It will include the ultimate civil right: to end life by choice …
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on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 4:29 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, costs, economics, elderly, hospitals.
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