Healthcare
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Ch 1.
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -Charles DarwinResident physicians: Too tired, or what?
Residents, or resident physicians, are young physicians who are completing their training by working, under the supervision of other physicians, very long hours for several years in a teaching hospital. Concern is routinely raised regarding being treated by physicians who are still learning, and might be exhausted and perhaps making poor judgments. Two current medical residents debate the issue.
Healthcare and the last days – Letting go
The surgeon Atal Gawande asks, "What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?" In the U.S., terminally ill patients are most often given aggressive cure-at-all-costs treatment rather than palliative, or comfort care. But while patients live about the same amount of time whichever choice is made, for aggressive treatment the quality-of-life is much lower, and the economic costs are enormously higher. Gawande suggests that, for terminally ill patients, by changing the focus of their care to quality-of-life rather than aggressive treatment, the economic problem itself will be significantly lessened as a result.
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