As discussed here and elsewhere, the big medical-related news last week was California's new end-of-life law. After the law was signed, Karl Lorenz, MD, a professor of medicine at the Palo Alto Veterans Medical Center, and two of his Stanford colleagues wrote in the Sacramento Bee about an aspect of end-of-life care they say wasn't addressed in the debate over the legislation: how to improve the situation for those very sick patients who don't want assistance dying.
After writing that "most of us want an effective treatment for pain, not a life-ending prescription," the authors ask:
Will our legislators advocate for better end-of-life care? Will they invest in quality measures and public reporting that help us choose a good and not just a shorter end? Will they fund an electronic registry so that patients’ decisions against life-sustaining treatment are readily available? Will they make transparent the financial incentives for more efficient end-of-life care or support training in palliative care for nurses, social workers and physicians?
Such solutions represent the investment that most of us need to avoid an end that we mostly don’t want...
Previously: Stanford bioethicist weighs in on California’s new end-of-life law, How would you like to die? Tell your doctor in a letter, Study: Doctors would choose less aggressive end-of-life care for themselves, Stanford experts weigh in on spate of “right to try” laws for the terminally ill, On a mission to transform end-of-life care and The importance of patient/doctor end-of-life discussions
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