Surprise, or maybe not – Palliative Care Extends Life, Study Finds
In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer.
The findings, published online Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine, confirmed what palliative care specialists had long suspected. The study also, experts said, cast doubt on the decision to strike end-of-life provisions from the health care overhaul passed last year.
“It shows that palliative care is the opposite of all that rhetoric about ‘death panels,’ ” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-author of an editorial in the journal accompanying the study. “It’s not about killing Granny; it’s about keeping Granny alive as long as possible — with the best quality of life.”
Actually i am not surprised. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Osler, goes, “”The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease”
I fear that to often sub-specialists focus on the disease more than the patient. They do not do this because they do not care, rather they live reading and talking about disease. They are, almost by definition, disease-focused.
We had a situation during my father’s illness where a medication, prescribed to slow his metastatic cancer, caused significant side effects which greatly hampered my father’s quality of life. He decided (and as a physician son I concurred) that he should stop the medication. Fortunately my father had no symptoms from the cancer; unfortunately he had symptoms from a medication.
According to my father, the oncologist did not understand his decision to discontinue the medication and appeared angry about that decision.
Now perhaps I am exaggerating, and I do not really know the interchange. But I have seen too many patients with physicians who focus on slowing the disease “at all costs”.
Having a good primary care physician involved can work. Having excellent palliative care can work.
Palliative care works because it is patient focused. And after all, our job is to treat patients.
Bravo to the group who did this study.
