How doctors get sucked into inappropriate care – 6minutes

Frailty in old age is similar to cancer in that it may be terminal, writes intensive care specialist Professor Ken Hillman in his new book, A Good Life to the End.*

Doctors are able to predict the likelihood of survival for elderly individuals and groups of patients with some accuracy. However, this does not seem to influence the use of inappropriate and aggressive medical care, writes Professor Hillman.

He says patient safety includes managing the dying and frail safely, not just preventing potentially preventable adverse events.

He is concerned that fighting old age and frailty with drugs and complex interventions is an expensive and largely ineffective exercise.

The inference is that frailty may be avoidable or even curable. Apart from giving false hope, it reinforces the current complicity between modern medicine and our society, inferring that all things are treatable or even curable.

He raises the prospect of frailty assuming a medical life of its own, with specific diagnostic criteria and an assumption that it can be treated.

We may gradually lose sight of the inevitability of frailty and be blinded by the prospect of immortality, he writes.

However, as the palliative care approach gains traction, he says a new system could look something like this:

*From A Good Life to the End by Ken Hillman. Published by Allen & Unwin. In stores now. RRP: $29.99

Visit link:
How doctors get sucked into inappropriate care - 6minutes