Thursday, October 29, 2009
Two related articles on dialysis in older patients, as I alluded to in last week's post:First is from the NEJM and looks at functional status in older adults residing in nursing homes before and after initiating dialysis. It uses data from the Minimum Data Set and the US Renal Data System, and looks at all ~3700 patients (mean age 73 years,...
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
NEJM has an important paper about the natural history of advanced dementia. The data come from a prospective study (2003-7) of patients with advanced dementia residing in 22 nursing homes in the Boston area. 'Advanced' dementia here means patients with a Cognitive Performance Scale (part of the MDS) of 5 or greater. A CPS of 5 corresponds...
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Imagine the year is 2022. You're a palliative care practitioner working with a hospital based team. An emergency department physician calls you to see an 83 year old man with stage D congestive heart failure who came to the hospital with a several day history of worsening dyspnea and orthopnea. He had two admissions earlier in the year....
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The New York Times continues its coverage of hospice and palliative care related issues with a compelling report (with associated audio slideshow) on a volunteer hospice service at Coxsackie Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The article discusses the aging of the prison population, but mainly focuses on the experiences of inmates...
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
From my back-log of Journal of Clinical Oncology issues.1)First is an editorial about health related quality of life, cancer survival, and research (free full-text here). (It's a response to this paper about HRQOL predicting survial in early stage head and neck cancer; I think most readers will find the editorial more interesting.) The...
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Tom Quinn, our 3rd contributor to the blog, is leaving Pallimed. I want to acknowledge the wonderful work he has done for the blog over the years, and thank him personally for his contributions, wisdom, and equanimity. ...As well as recall fondly the day last March when we received our award at AAHPM that Russell Portenoy called him both a doctor and a 'young man.' If you're a late-comer to Pallimed - you can peruse Tom's...
It was inevitable that The Onion would tackle the 'death panel' debacle, which they did this last week with:Obama: Health Care Plan Would Give Seniors Right To Choose How They Are KilledIt's as obnoxious as you'd expect from The Onion...Obama also accused his opponents of using scare tactics to score political points, manipulating seniors' fears with misinformation about their upcoming state-mandated deaths.Etc. Etc. I usually...
1)There is a late entry (at least as far as application deadlines go) for next year's AAHPM annual assembly: an "Interactive Educational Exchange: Sharing Innovative Teaching Materials and Methods." The organizers of this session are looking for submissions of innovative educational projects/materials/etc. Unfortunately, there is no website...
Sunday, October 11, 2009
With a tagline like: "What exactly is a death panel?" PBS is starting to sound like an afternoon tabloid show, but they end up covering the topic very well in the 25 minute clip now available online. I am sure many palliative care people are familiar with the Gundersen Lutheran "Respecting Choices" project to increase the communication...
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Geripal has done a excellent job with October's edition of Palliative Care Grand Rounds, the monthly best of the Palliative Care blogs (not to be confused with what I posted last week which was the weekly best of all medicine blogs).
Eric Widera and Alex Smith give you a cleanly organized overview that you should spend a little time with this week. If you have any interesting posts send them on to Amber Wollesen...
Top Blog Posts (most viewed) from September 2009:
Refining Treatment Preferences for Patients Who Want "Everything"
'Exceptional Rationalization, Denial and Resistance Techniques'
Onsolis and FDA Opioid REMS: Is this the future of opioid prescribing?
Huckabee, Kennedy and the Politics of Distortion
Death Panel Concerns in the UK with the Liverpool Care Pathway
Top Commented Articles from August 2009:
Onsolis and FDA...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Welcome to Grand Rounds, a weekly round-up of the best of the medical blogosphere. We here at Pallimed (Drew, Lyle, Amy, Amber and myself) are honored to be hosting Grand Rounds for the 3rd time. For the history books here are the 2007 (theme: prognostication) and 2008 editions. The theme this week is "The Art of Medicine...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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