… not all moaning, twitching, agitation or other new symptoms near the end of life are due to ‘terminal restlessness’. See the summary on delirium at end-of-life. slides 7-8-9 list common things that might be going on slides 10-11-12-13 give some (non-pharmacologic) inteventions to try A common cause of new symptoms (twitching, restlessness, moaning) or […]
terminal restlessness … Read More »
“In an article edited in Lancet in 1887, which criticized the diagnosis and therapy by phone, which were really exalted at that time, we can find a comment on this picture: “The child lies desperately ill while the parents huddle in the background, fearful, helpless and grief-stricken. There is nothing more the physician can do
… Dino D’Agata discusses Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death in his “Hope as Forbidden Metaphor“. “Yet Didion also, to my chagrin, succumbs to post-modernity’s coercion when she, like Rieff, begins recriminating herself for wanting to believe her husband still lives. You want to shake her and
grief and eternity … Read More »
… a good summary of the move (back) to providing care in our patient’s homes.
why health care is going home … Read More »
… a study that tried to improve end-of-life care in the intensive care unit with a series of education interventions concluded that “… this intervention was associated with no improvement in quality of dying … Improving ICU end-of-life care will require interventions with more direct contact with patients and family.” Shades of the SUPPORT study
palliative care in the icu … Read More »
… performed this weekend by the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Hege discusses. listen to excerpts … Much like life and death … “There’s a sense of tragedy at the beginning, a visceral quality that grabs you right from the outset. Then it goes through all these different moods — of being ambivalent; of being very
mahler symphony #2 … resurrection … Read More »
… Vaclav Havel opens the “Forum 2000” conference … Much of what he says has direct applicability to health care, health care reform & palliative care … “I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that
close together … but otherwise desperately remote … Read More »
John Prine performs “Hello in There” Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello.” So if you’re walking down the street sometime And spot some hollow ancient eyes, Please don’t just pass ’em by
… one of the great myths of our time? Manzi writing in City Journal “What Social Science Does – and Doesn’t – Know”. … with applications to evidence based medicine … “By about a quarter-century ago, however, it had become obvious to sophisticated experimentalists that the idea that we could settle a given policy debate
the experimental method … Read More »
