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COMMENTS AND OPINIONS
Life Prolonging in Name Only?
Stephen Workman, MD, MSc
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Zhang et al1(p480) introduce their study about communication at the end of life by observing that "Life-sustaining medical care of patients with advanced cancer at the end of life (EOL) is costly." However, their data suggest that such "life-sustaining" treatments do not prolong life, although they clearly show that such suffering-inducing treatments result in a poorer quality of death.
If treatment at the end of life is to be appropriate to the context, linguistic changes are required. So long as treatments are invariably conceived of and offered to such patient groups as "life sustaining," physicians will have the very difficult task of convincing people that death is preferable to life. How many patients with terminal cancer would prefer suffering-inducing treatments over life-sustaining ones?
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Correspondence: Dr Workman, 1278 Tower Rd, Halifax, NS B3H 2Y9, Canada (Stephen.Workman@Dal.ca).
1. Zhang B, Wright AA, Huskamp HA; et al. Health care costs in the last week of life: associations with end-of-life conversations. Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(5):480-488.
FREE FULL TEXT
Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(16):1540.
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Life Prolonging in Name Only?—Reply
Holly G. Prigerson, Alexi A. Wright, Paul K. Maciejewski, and Susan D. Block
Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(16):1540-1541.
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