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OPINIONOur dying patients deserve a good end to their livesCommentary. By Eric Anderson, MD, AMNews contributor. Dec. 9, 2002. It was not a good week for physicians picking up newspapers. On Monday, Last Acts, a coalition of over 400 professional and consumer organizations, called the United States a "cold and uncaring place to die." Its study, carried out by the national political research firm Lake Snell Perry and Associates Inc., surveyed 1,000 adults who had lost a close relative in the last five years. Sixty percent of those interviewed gave the U.S. health care system a grade of only fair or lower, and 25% described it as poor. And before doctors could really digest that story, the next day a panel of 16 experts from the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences proclaimed, nationwide, that the U.S. health care system was in crisis and "incapable of meeting the present, let alone the future, needs of the American public." As a physician who has stood guard in the primary-care trenches for 40 years, I'm not always troubled by what the generals, some with their own battle plans, bellow from the castle towers -- though I agree it's scandalous that a country with money for the world somehow doesn't have any to provide heath care umbrellas for our nation's 41.2 million medically uninsured. So I can live with some of the salvos from the NAS. But as a physician whose life has been one-on-one, face-to-face with individual patients, I am surely bothered that a representative group of our patients finds us wanting in providing end-of-life care. The Last Acts report should give us pause. Living wills, durable powers of attorney and attempts to promote hospice haven't been enough. We need more. Our patients do. Simply learning how to treat terminal pain better isn't enough of an improvement. [...] Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2002 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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