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Showing posts with label Doctor of Medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor of Medicine. Show all posts

Friday, December 27, 2013

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The ePrognosis App: How Calculating Life Expectancy Can Influence Healthcare Decision-Making

Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

Last month an intriguing new decision support app launched, created by experts in geriatrics and palliative care. It’s meant to help with an important primary care issue: cancer screening in older adults.
Have you ever asked yourself, when considering cancer screening for an older adult, whether the likely harms outweigh the likely benefits?
Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. The sentence above, after all, is a bit of wonky formulation for the following underlying questions:
  • How long is this person likely to live, given age and health situation?
  • Given this person’s prognosis, does cancer screening make sense?
The first question seems like one that could easily occur to a person — whether that be a patient, a family member, or a clinician – although I suspect it doesn’t occur to people perhaps as often as it should.
As for the second question, I’m not sure how often it pops up in people’s minds, although it’s certainly very important to consider, given what we now know about the frequent harms of cancer screening in the elderly, and usually less frequent benefits.
Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that “inappropriate” cancer screening remains common. “Inappropriate” meaning the screening of people who are so unwell and/or old that they’re unlikely to live long enough to benefit from screening.
For instance, one astounding study found that 25% of physicians said...
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Great Coronary Angioplasty Debate: Giving Patients the Right to Speak | The Health Care Blog

Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By Nortin Hadler, MD
Earlier this month, the editors of THCB saw fit to post my essay, “The End of the Era of Coronary Angioplasty.”
The comments posted on THCB in response to the essay, and those the editors and I have directly received, have been most gratifying. The essay is an exercise in informing medical decisions, which is my creed as a clinician and perspective as a clinical investigator.
I use the recent British federal guideline document as my object lesson. This Guideline examines the science that speaks to the efficacy of the last consensus indication for angioplasty, the setting of an acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Clinical science has rendered all other indications, by consensus, relative at best. But in the case of STEMI, the British guideline panel supports the consensus and concludes that angioplasty should be “offered” in a timely fashion.
I will not repeat my original essay here since it is only a click away. The exercise I display is how I would take this last consensus statement into a trusting, empathic patient-physician discourse. This is a hypothetical exercise to the extent that little in the way of clear thinking can be expected of a patient in the throes of a STEMI, and not much more of the patient’s caring community.
So all of us, we the people regardless of our credentials, need to consider and value the putative efficacy of angioplasty (with or without stenting) a priori. For me, personally, there is...
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