Undue Influence: Corporate Sponsorship of Professional Society Meetings
There was a great report in one of the most influential medical periodicals today. Not NEJM, or JAMA, or Annals of Internal Medicine. I'm talking about the USA Today. The…
The Effects of DNR Orders on Post-Surgical Outcomes
If you happened to read WebMD the other day you would have seen an article with the headlines ‘DNR Orders May Affect Surgical Outcomes’. This is a fair enough title,…
Autonomy for Frail Elders
What does autonomy mean to a 95 year old woman with disability, dementia, and heart failure residing in a nursing home? Beauchamp and Childress's classic text "Principles of Biomedical Ethics" devotes 41…
Dying without Dialysis
There is a terrific article in this weeks Journal of Pain and Symptom Management by Fliss Murtagh of King's College in London about the epidemiology of symptoms for patients with advanced…
Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease: An Idea Not Ready for Prime Time
Generally, Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed only after patients have progressed to major levels of cognitive impairment that results in substantial problems in daily functioning. But the brain changes that result…
3 Issues of Hospice
by: Robert Killeen MD Three Issues of Hospice I’d like to address three recurrent problems I’ve found in the field of hospice and palliative care. These three issues span our…
Q&A with Jeff Gordon – Author of “A Death Prolonged”
Many terminal patients linger through their final months with a miserable quality of life and too often with extreme levels of suffering. Today’s high-tech medical care can sustain technical life…
Penalizing Hospitals for Readmissions: Unintended Consequences?
Medicare recently started publicly reporting hospital readmission rates as a measure of quality, and there are proposals to financially penalize hospitals with high rates of readmission. A recent article in…
Palliative Care Grand Rounds
Welcome to Palliative Care Grand Rounds! This monthly blog carnival highlights some of the best and most interesting blog posts related to palliative care. Grand Rounds are published on the…