Aggressive Treatments at End of Life Linked to Worse Quality of Death

Aggressive Treatments at End of Life Linked to Worse Quality of Death:

"'The more time patients spent under hospice care, the greater their quality of death,' Mr. Silverman said. 'For example, patients who received at least 5 weeks of hospice care were in less physical distress in their last week of life than those who lived less than a week with hospice, and those who received no hospice at all were in the most physical distress at the end of their lives. These results suggest that when patients are actively dying, the use of aggressive treatments should be considered with caution and only pursued with the full understanding of patients or their surrogate decision makers.' "

Another pet topic of mine, poor end-of-life care. This is especially tragic, as it represents people being egged on to continue aggressive treatments with full knowledge that there will be no substantial benefit. The resources wasted by this are secondary to the human suffering, but they are massive.

Cheers.

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