The New Health Dialogue

The New England Journal of Medicine has a very important study and editorial (and kudos to them for putting both out on the web open to all, not just subscribers) on how palliative care prolonged the life of dying lung cancer patients -- and gave them a better quality of life. In fact, the patients with palliative care lived an average of 2.7 months longer than a similar group of patients who received standard cancer care at the same hospital. And two months is about how much state-of-the-art chemo can add to life. Here's the start of an online magazine piece, Palliative Care May Trump Heroic Measures in Life Expectancy, I did for Miller-McCune (a smart, relatively new magazine based in California that you should check out if you don't know it):

What if those “death panels” were actually good for your health?

The death panels, of course, don’t exist; they were the product of overheated political imaginations amid an overheated debate about health care reform. But palliative care does exist — and despite the distortions of last summer’s debate, it doesn’t mean “pulling the plug on Grandma.” (Or Grandpa for that matter, although he seems to have been neglected in the national brouhaha about death panels.)

A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that palliative care — which includes talking to patients and families about treatment goals and end-of-life wishes — doesn’t hasten death.

To the contrary, the study of terminally ill lung cancer patients found that early access to palliative care prolonged life — even though the patients opted for less aggressive care as they neared death.

Read the rest here.