An article in the NY Times that might be of interest to some Tipsters: it focuses on end-of-life care, how "palliative care" doctors deal with patients with terminal prognoses, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/health/20doctors.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
The article follows a specific doctor who has been providing this care. Quoting from the article: |Part psychoanalyst, part detective, Dr. O'Mahony had to listen |to the cues and decide what to do next. | |Most doctors do not excel at delivering bad news, decades of |studies show, if only because it goes against their training to save |lives, not end them. But Dr. O'Mahony, who works at Montefiore |Medical Center in the Bronx, belongs to a class of doctors, known |as palliative care specialists, who have made death their life's work. |They study how to deliver bad news, and they do it again and again. |They know secrets like who, as a rule, takes it better. They know |who is more likely to suffer silently, and when is the best time to |suggest a do-not-resuscitate order. | |Palliative care has become a recognized subspecialty, with fellowships, |hospital departments and medical school courses aimed at managing |patients' last months. It has also become a focus of attacks on plans |to overhaul the nation's medical system, with false but persistent rumors |that the government will set up "death panels" to decide who deserves |treatment. Many physicians dismiss these complaints as an absurd |caricature of what palliative medicine is all about. Perhaps this article will be an effective counter to those, including students, who have been exposed to the misinformation provided by the far right in the U.S. On not. Even on TiPS, people choose what they want to believe even in the face of falsifying evidence. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
