Atul Gawande has a great piece in the New Yorker this week about the difficult and complex management of end stage disease in terminal patients. (See, I don’t always criticize the guy. He writes good stuff.) What happens when we reach the point where further treatment is futile, when death gathers momentum, threatens to overwhelm at any moment? What do we do with these brittle, emaciated, broken human beings, bodies riddled with cancer, when all the latest toxic chemotherapy options have been exhausted and there’s no more surgery to offer? What do we do when these patients don’t want to hear about “palliative care” and “hospice”, when they get angry or accuse you of abandonment when you tell the truth about their prognoses? There has to be something else, they plead, some new trial, some miracle cure. That faint sliver of light is what they grasp for when the darkness begins overtake them. Gawande:
There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.
It’s a great weekend read.
With the Rise of AI, What IP Disputes in Healthcare Are Likely to Emerge?
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
Dr. Jeffrey Parks is a board certified general surgeon working in Cleveland who writes regularly at Buckeye Surgeon.
