Many dying cancer patients still get screenings

[bemildred]

(Reuters) - Cancer patients with only a few years to live often continue to get routine mammograms or blood tests for prostate cancer even though they are not likely to live long enough to benefit from them, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Besides wasting money, the tests do harm, exposing patients to the extra worry of diagnosing and even treating a cancer that may never harm them, they said.

"Patients may be subject to unnecessary risk due to subsequent testing, biopsies, and psychological distress," Camelia Sima of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For the study, Sima's team analyzed data on people 65 or older with advanced lung, colorectal, pancreatic and other cancers enrolled in Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69B5RF20101012

[pansypoo53219]

1. medical industrial complex.

or medicare fraud.

[KT2000]

2. I sure don't think

this is a case of patients demanding those tests.

[pnwmom]

3. Another dumb thing is treating dying patients with blood thinners

to keep them from dying of a blood clot.

If I was in end stage cancer or Alzheimers, I'd rather die quickly from a blood clot.

[bemildred]

4. My brother was dying of liver cancer/cirrhosis/sclerosing chondritis.

They put a PIC line in him a week before he died, for "agressive chemotherapy". It was a real ordeal for him and me both to get him down to the clinic so they could do that. I don't doubt they meant well, but there is a failure to think here, and you can't just leave it up to dying patients to make these judgements.

[pnwmom]

5. And even the relatives of these patients aren't in good shape

for making these decisions.

It's better to think through this as much as possible before you find yourself or a loved one in this kind of situation. Living wills are one place to start.

[bemildred]

6. And power of attorneys for health care, and getting into hospice care in a timely way.

If you want to control what happens to you and your family afterwards, you have to take care of business.

[wishlist]

8. We insisted my 88 yr old Mother in law not be given cholesterol meds etc

My mother in law in a nursing home had a sensitive stomach and all the meds they were giving made her sick so a couple of years before her death we stopped the cholesterol and a couple other unnecessary drugs for someone her age. She felt better after stopping those meds.

[wishlist]

7. VA sent my 85 yr old Dad w/lung cancer, heart failure a letter to have colonoscopy done

I found letter VA had sent to my Dad urging him to have colonoscopy screening when the last thing in the world my Dad needed in the year before his death was the ordeal of a colonoscopy. He had no bowel problems but he did have such poor eyesight and COPD that running to the bathroom during the necessary cleaning out process for a colonoscopy would have been impossible. He kept the letter but of course did not get the test done.