I have been attempting to write about health-care for weeks. As the debate has raged, I have made an effort to read, listen, study, and question the myriad intricacies of this polarizing subject. I was overwhelmed! Therefore, for the next few Tuesdays this blog will explore health-care bit-by-bit. My approach is to deliver to you—simply and succinctly—ideas on how, I believe, health-care can be improved. I welcome your feedback.
Today: Palliative Care
If you were paying attention to the health-care debate this summer, the words palliative care probably ring a bell. The house bill addressed palliative care, and it needs to be addressed. Sadly, and wrongly, Sarah Palin tweeted that this would create death-panels that would choose whether ill people should live or die.
A disproportionate amount of health-care dollars are spent during the last year of life—this simply needs to change. I have encountered numerous stories of how expensive test and useless x-rays are ordered for patients, that save a miracle, will be dead in a matter of weeks, maybe months. The following link is to a story of an oncology nurse's view inside the trenches of what’s happening with end-of-life care, and why it should change. The story takes about three minutes to read and is very insightful.
President Obama explained in his nationally televised health-care speech, and I paraphrase: Palliative care is not about death panels; it’s about insurance providing funds so that families can sit down with doctors to talk about options for terminally ill loved ones. I agree that money is better spent to inform families of the options for dying loved ones than throwing money on delaying the inevitable. However, regular doctors and nurses are not always the best people for this job—they’ve been trained to do everything in their power to save lives; helping families let go is counter to this training. Palliative doctors are trained in medicine, but also in hospice care and even spiritual care. As the baby-boomer population ages, this relatively new discipline should be in demand.
As I was ready to post this story, I got an email from a friend who was at the hospital with his dad who has been fighting lung cancer. My friend was faced with the excruciating ordeal of deciding on breathing and feeding help for his dad to prolong his life a few days or weeks, or making him comfortable with drugs, in which case he was looking at a couple of hours, or maybe a couple of days.
I know that if my son or daughter were lying in a hospital bed and I was faced with this decision, I would be so tempted to prolong the inevitable; even if it was just so that I could watch their chest rise and fall.
Palliative care is not about “death panels”. While the dollars and cents of keeping people alive needs to be addressed, make no mistake, the biggest cost is the emotional one.
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