Wednesday, August 12, 2009

End of life counseling: Resolute Obfuscation strikes out again



Posted by a href="http://resolutedetermination.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/section-1233/#comments"Homegrown Boy/a:br /br /blockquotespan style="font-style:italic;"Section 1233. Kind of an Orwellian tinge to it.br /br /Well it is Orwellian for it refers to the end of life counseling sick seniors will get from the state run medical society if it passes. (cmon angry Brooks Brothers mobsters – make my day)br /br /It refers to financial incentives for agreeing to die.br /br /Please note the well to do with educated kids will be there to intervene but the poor and uneducated will be told it’s all good and the plug will get pulled./span/blockquotebr /br /Utter horseshit, and a href="http://resolutedetermination.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/section-1233/#comment-1736"Nancy Willing has already replied to it/a there.br /br /On the off chance, however, that HGB is truly just ignorant and not posturing with talking points, let's visit a href="http://medicalfutility.blogspot.com/2009/08/end-of-life-treatment-consultations.html"Thaddeus Pope at Medical Futility Blog/a and find out what the last decade of research into end-of-life counseling has actually found:br /br /blockquotespan style="font-style:italic;"Peer-reviewed, published studies [are[ establishing that end-of-life consultations improve care. Among other points made in the linked articles:br /br /blockquoteEnd-of-life discussions decrease suffering and distress for patients and loved onesbr /br /Hospice patients live longerbr /br /Inability to participate in treatment decisions can cause patients uncertainty and distressbr /br /87% of patients say they “want as much information as possible”br /br /Patients want doctors to communicate with them about their treatment options/span/blockquote/blockquotebr /br /There are--as I make the count--four ways HGB could choose to react to the information that his beliefs are not upheld by the research:br /br /1) He could, in the face of new data, modify his beliefs. [Did I mention this was the least likely outcome?]br /br /2) He might challenge the reliability, validity, or objectivity of the studies. [But to do that--rather than just to make some vague ideological point that he doesn't trust liberal academics--he would not only have to link through multiple times, read the studies, and then educate himself on what ireliability/i and ivalidity/i mean as statistical terms.]br /br /3) He might make dark references to the fact that the government will use thought-wave transference and kidnapping of family members to influence doctors who have cared for these patients for years into being willing to urge them just to pull the plug so that they can get their ideath bonuses/i and pay for their new Mercedes.br /br /4) He could just ignore the fact that somebody challenged him with data and keep talking louder and louder.br /br /Point of clarification: the fact that I am pointing out that end-of-life counseling in the current versions of the health insurance reform bill is not a dire government plot to kill granny is not to be construed as an endorsement of the bill. It is to be construed as a statement that when I oppose provisions of the bill, or the process by which it is being crafted, I will try to do so using actual facts instead of shit I just made up.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7893272060787897238-4733125125935965954?l=delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com'//div

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