FYI: Slow Medicine

[elleng]

"Edie Gieg, 85, strides ahead of people half her age and plays a fast-paced game of tennis. But when it comes to health care, she is a champion of “slow medicine,” an approach that encourages less aggressive — and less costly — care at the end of life.">>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/health/05slow.html?em&ex=1210219200&en=df0f58ab6fc8cc9a&ei=5087%0A#

[Warpy]

1. She's got decades on me and I champion the same thing

because I've been sick ever since I was a teenager and the last thing I want are heroics to prolong the disaster.

My mother called it "benign neglect" and tried to get her doc to do it. Afraid of litigation, he kept pushing stuff at her until the final "GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!" when he wanted to put in a shunt for dialysis. She was demented by that time, but not that demented.

There comes a time in most people's lives when they've simply had enough. Both families and medical professionals need to listen to their patients to find out when that is.

[elleng]

2. Warpy,

my father recognized it in '53, when docs suggested brain surgery for my (birth) mother, whose breast cancer had metasticized. He again recognized it, last week, when we learned that my (adopted) mother's breast cancer had metasticized to bone cancer in her cervical spine; we're not subjecting her (or him or us) to radiation.

She's in a nursing home now, and we're all suffering from cancer and dementia. Hospice will be on board once medicare is out of picture, that is, when her o.t. is no longer progressing.