Patients don’t want aggressive end-of-life care-but they get it, anyway

Doctors are trained to instigate aggressive life-prolonging treatments on terminally-ill patients-but they wouldn’t want it for themselves.

Around 88 per cent of doctors say they wouldn’t want any treatment to keep them alive, and would opt for a ‘do not resuscitate’ order. A similar number-around 80 per cent-of patients say the same.

Despite this, most doctors assume that patients would welcome aggressive treatment at the end of life, and the whole machinery of modern medicine would automatically swing into action to help keep a patient alive.

Researchers from Stanford University say the patient’s voice is often “too feeble and drowned out by the speed and intensity of a fragmented health-care system.”

The researchers based their findings on a survey of 1,081 American physicians in 2013 and compared the results to a poll of doctors made in 1989. Over those 25 years, the attitude of doctors to end-of-life care for themselves hasn’t changed.

(Source: Stanford School of Medicine website)

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