Hartford Grantee Dr. Diane E. Meier's Health Affairs Narrative Excerpted in The Washington Post
Hartford grantee Dr. Diane E. Meier's Health Affairs narrative about both a patient and her physician coming to grips with ending treatment was recently excerpted in The Washington Post's Health and Science Section. Dr. Meier is the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and a professor in the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
Hartford grantee Dr. Diane E. Meier's Health Affairs narrative about both a patient and her physician coming to grips with ending treatment was recently excerpted in The Washington Post's Health and Science Section. Dr. Meier is currently the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and a professor in the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
In working with a patient on palliative care options towards the end of life, Dr. Meiers examines the rationale behind why some physicians are relunctant to end treatments for their patients.
Retelling her experiences, Dr. Meier writes: "For years I had tried to understand why so many of my colleagues persisted in ordering tests, procedures and treatments that seemed to provide no benefit to patients and even risked harming them. I didn’t buy the popular and cynical explanation: Physicians do this for the money. It fails to acknowledge the care and commitment that these same physicians demonstrate toward their patients."
Overtreatment by the oncologist was an expression of care and committment, as Dr. Meier discovers.
To read the rest of the narrative, head over to Health Affairs.
