Health stories in the news
Palliative care or euthanasia?
Some physicians will heavily sedate dying patients to ease their suffering even though the medications they use may speed their patients’ deaths, a controversial practice called “terminal sedation”, writes reporter Anemoa Hartocollis in an excellent article today’s issue of the New York Times.
Hartocollis writes:
Doctors who perform it say it is based on carefully thought-out ethical principles in which the goal is never to end someone’s life, but only to make the patient more comfortable.
But the possibility that the process might speed death has some experts contending that the practice is, in the words of one much-debated paper, a form of “slow euthanasia,” and that doctors who say otherwise are fooling themselves and their patients.
To learn more:
- Read Hartocollis’ article Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation.
UW physician and researcher Dr. Walter Stamm dies
Chlamydia
In an obituary this week, veteran New York Times health reporter Dr. Lawrence Altman recounted the accomplishments and contributions of Dr. Walter Stamm, a UW physician and scientist “whose research spared many women from infertility and helped prevent, control and treat certain common infectious diseases.”
Altman writes:
Among his accomplishments, Dr. Stamm clarified the role of a bacterium, chlamydia trachomatis, in causing pelvic inflammatory disease that often leads to infertility among women . . . “Countless women owe their fertility to Walt Stamm and his colleagues in Seattle,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, an infectious disease expert who is chairman of the department of medicine at New York University and who succeeded Dr. Stamm as president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
To learn more:
- Read Altman’s article Walter Stamm Dies at 64; Helped Curb Chlamydia
PHOTO CREDIT: Dr. E. Arum, Dr. N. Jacobs/CDC
The high cost of end-of-life care
New York Times reporter Reed Abelson profiles Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A Medical Center, which, he writes, “has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life.”
As a result, according to one research group, Medicare pays about $50,000 to the hospital during the last six months of a patient’s life, spending weeks in the hospital under specialists’ care, compared to $25,000 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where doctors care is closely coordinated and are “slow to bring in specialists and aim to avoid expensive treatments that offer little or no benefit to a patient,” he writes.
But are the U.C.L.A wrong to treat their patients so aggressively?
Do the statistics obscure the lives they save?
To learn more:
- Read Abelson’s article: Weighing Medical Costs of End-of-Life Care.
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