Treating patients as they want to be treated

David Rieff, writing in the New York Times:

What my mother wanted — which was to undergo any treatment, no matter how terrible, that promised a cure for her disease — would probably have been viewed skeptically by a physician schooled in what Groopman calls the “bean counting” of evidence-based medicine. But doctors like Nimer and Groopman hold that their mission is to try to treat their patients as their patients want to be treated until doing so can be called with assurance (rather than in terms of probability alone) medically futile.

Comments

[JorgXMcKie]

Gosh, I hope Rieff is not a backer of some national health care plan, for if so, those like his mother who wanted "to undergo any treatment, no matter how terrible, that promised a cure" was just be out of luck. Most of those treatments would be legally unavailable.

Perhaps his next column will address this.