Venting About Ventilators

Yesterday, the New York Times published a short article I wrote about what family caregivers can do to try to keep vulnerable older family members safe during the coronavirus epidemic. We as individuals and as a society should do our utmost to keep everyone healthy; my article suggests a few strategies to help those older people who live in the community but need help with personal care or other basic daily functions. 

In many cases, our strategies will succeed, but we have to be realistic and think about the possibility that, despite our best efforts, some older adults—those in their 70s, 80s, or 90s—will get sick. A minority will get so sick that physicians will propose transferring them to the intensive care unit (ICU); most of those brought to the intensive care unit will be breathing so poorly that doctors will advise a ventilator, or breathing machine. 

The popular press makes it sound as though with ICU treatment in general and a ventilator in particular, older patients infected with Covid-19 will live and without this form of treatment, they will die. The reality may be quite different. A report of the experience of nine Seattle-area hospitals just published in the New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on the question.

The authors report on 24 patients with Covid-19 who were sick enough to be admitted to the ICU. Five of them were over age 80 and five were between 70 and 80. This is a very small sample, but the paper is one of the few published reports that included detailed information about each patient. The outcomes were sobering.

In this group of 10 very sick older Covid-19 patients, 8 died, for a mortality rate of 80 percent. By comparison, among the 14 very sick Covid-19 patients under age 70, 5 died, or 36 percent. A subset of the 24 extremely ill patients received mechanical ventilation—a tube was inserted into their lungs that was connected to a machine that breathed for them. Among the 7 patients over 70 who were both in the ICU and intubated, 6 died, or 86 percent, compared to 4 out of the 11 intubated patients under age 70 (36 percent). The sole case of an older patient with Covid-19 who was intubated and lived was notable for the complete absence of underlying chronic conditions (comorbid conditions, as defined by the study, include asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, obstructive sleep apnea, infection with human immunodeficiency virus, immunosuppression, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke).

An earlier study from China found that among 52 patients admitted to the ICU with Covid-19, the survival rate for people over 70 was 10 percent compared to 45 percent among those under 70.  

Data from the National Health Service in England reporting on the British experience through March 27 found that of 157 patients admitted to an intensive care unit with Covid-19, 73 percent of those aged 70 or older died compared to 35 percent among those under 70. 

In summary, in these three reports, survival rates were low for older patients admitted to the ICU, particularly for anyone who was put on a ventilator. That doesn’t mean it never happens. But it strongly suggests that if you are over 70 and if, despite all the best efforts at prevention, you do get the virus, and if you are one of the minority who become extremely ill with the infection, the outlook is poor. 

Many though by no means all people, if they know the end is likely to be near, do not want aggressive medical treatment that offers little or no benefit. This goes for people with advanced cancer, severe heart disease, or any of a variety of other conditions that are usually fatal. They’d rather receive medications such as morphine to ease their shortness of breath and medications such as lorazepam to ease their anxiety than to undergo extremely uncomfortable treatment that has only a small chance of prolonging their lives. Severe Covid-19 is another condition for the oldest Americans to consider adding to the list.

We all hope we won’t get the virus and that if we do get it, we’ll have a mild case. We hope that if we have a more serious case, we won’t be sick enough for doctors to propose transferring us to the ICU and using a ventilator. But if you are over 70 and you become severely ill with Covid-19, you will be facing a situation that may be as dire as advanced cancer. To be sure, if you survive the coronavirus infection, you might have a good quality of life (though this, too, is uncertain as we know little about life-after-the-virus for those who have been in an ICU) and you might live for some time. If you benefit from treatment of advanced cancer, on the other hand, the benefit may be short-lived. But in both cases, you have a choice. You can decide that you want any and all treatments, however burdensome and however likely or unlikely they are to improve your condition. Or you can opt for a more palliative approach. You don’t have to accept treatment that you regard as excessively burdensome. You don’t have to spend what might be—but might not be—your last days in an ICU with a machine breathing for you, unable to eat or speak. You can choose instead to be treated with intravenous fluids, oxygen, assorted medications, and other forms of supportive care but to decline admission to an ICU and intubation. Your general state of health (before coming down with a coronavirus infection) and your personal preferences should guide your decision.

Most people with Covid-19 infections do not become so desperately ill that they are admitted to an ICU and intubated. Specifying in advance whether you would want this kind of treatment by signing a simple advance directive and discussing your wishes with your health care proxy is a type of insurance policy. Like flood insurance and fire insurance, you hope you will never need to make use of it. But it’s good to have it, just in case.

Can We Talk?

This week revealed the long-awaited results of a trial of the “Serious Illness Program,” the meticulously designed and carefully studied project of researchers in palliative care at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and at the Boston think tank, Ariadne Labs. Initially conceived of as a “checklist” by checklist enthusiast and founding director of Ariadne, Atul Gawande, the program has evolved into an educational program for clinicians. Specifically, it involves teaching physicians to use the “Serious Illness Conversation Guide” to structure discussions with patients about end of life preferences and values. In this study, carried out at 41 “clusters” comprised of 91 physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants working within the Dana Farber orbit, palliative care physicians did the teaching and provided follow up coaching. Ultimately, only 35 clusters providing care to 209 eligible patients had evaluable data. What the results showed is that despite all the effort spread over a four-year period, the Serious Illness Conversation Guide failed to achieve any of its primary outcomes.

The researchers hypothesized that if physicians were trained to use the researchers’ communications tool, patients would be more likely to have “goal-concordant care;” that is, the treatment they received would be aligned with their wishes. In addition, it was hoped, they would be more likely to experience a peaceful end of life. Neither effect was observed. There was less anxiety and depression among patients whose physicians had been trained to use the Serious Illness Conversation Guide, though perhaps a less-labor intensive or qualitatively different approach would have achieved the same effect.

What should we conclude from the failure of this communications guide to achieve its goals? The authors blame it on the small sample size and low patient accrual rate. They point out that their conclusions are of limited generalizability, given that the patient population was predominantly white, affluent, and college-educated. The more fundamental question, however, is whether the intervention itself is valuable. Despite its being well-received by physicians, perhaps the tool is just not an effective approach to educating physicians in communication skills. 

An even deeper assumption of this study is that the major problem with end of life care is poor communication by physicians. A very different perspective formed the basis of the Robert Wood Johnson’s program, Promoting Excellence at the End of Life, which focused principally on educating and empowering patients. This program, despite an enormous financial commitment and extensive evaluation, also failed, as evidenced by the 1995 SUPPORT study, “The Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments.” The reality, I suspect, is that we need to simultaneously affect both physicians and patients if end of life care is to change. 

One more possibility to consider is that despite what patients say when given theoretical options such as "would you rather die at home or in the hospital?" or "when you are at the end of life, would you prefer comfort care?" in fact, when faced with the reality of a life-limiting illness, patients want all possible efforts at life-prolongation, whatever the personal cost, and they expect their physicians to provide them. Maybe they don't want to discuss options with their physicians. The language of obituaries, "he passed away after a long battle" or after a "heroic struggle" very likely reflects contemporary culture. We need to study what patients want when they are faced with an actual illness, not with an abstract possibility.

What Does Dying Have to Do With It?

What Katy Butler gets spectacularly right in her new book, The Art of Dying Well, is that if we want life's last chapter to be a good one, there’s a great deal more to talk about than death and dying. She understands, which so many writers about aging do not, that maintaining function—the ability to walk, to see, to hear, and a host of other verbs describing the actions that are critical for a fulfilling life—is of paramount importance in this phase of life. She understands that medical tests, procedures, and treatments often do more harm than good and this danger becomes greater as the number of underlying medical problems grows, which happens more and more often with advancing age. So why, then, does she call her book the “art of dying well?”

At first, I speculated that the title had been chosen by the publisher’s marketing division, as often happens, chosen perhaps because books about dying are in vogue, or at least more so than are books about frailty or chronic disease. Then I wondered whether the problem was merely semantic—after all, the formative experience that awakened Butler to the issue of “dying well” was that of her father, which she poignantly describes in her previous book, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Her father had a stroke, only to spend the next seven or so years declining, his life prolonged by medical technology such as a pacemaker. From his daughter’s point of view, that entire period of decline could be viewed as “dying,” even though it was measured in years, not days or months. But Butler says that her goal in her new book is to provide readers with “a step-by-step guide to remaining as healthy and happy as possible, and as medically and unafraid, through the predictable health stages of late life, from vigorous old age to final breath.” Although I would argue with the implication that everyone goes through “predictable health stages”—some people plunge headlong into frailty, for example, whereas others move towards it gradually and others go directly from being robust to dying with virtually no time between the two—she does acknowledge that there’s more to old age than dying. In the very next breath, however, she says that “the goal of each chapter is to help you thrive and keep you on a path to a good end of life.” In other words, a major part of the point is to act today to assure a good death tomorrow. I would emphasize optimizing each day, rather than assuming that the purpose of your behavior today is to prevent a bad death.

The same phenomenon of grasping what old age is all about but not quite getting it is evident in Butler’s misconception about the “goals of care.” In Chapter 4, “Awareness of Mortality,” she asserts that discussing the goals of care is “medical shorthand for exploring what matters most to you [yes!], and how medicine can help you accomplish it [yes!], when time is short and cure is not in the cards [no!]” I think that patients and their physicians need to clarify the goals of care at every stage of life, not just when the end is near. It’s true that most people who are vigorous and are not afflicted with a fatal illness will choose life-prolongation as their main goal. But it is also true that many people who suffer from multiple chronic conditions but who do not have a terminal diagnosis and who can anticipate another ten years of life may choose as their principal goal of care “maximizing function.” Butler is right that for some physicians, discussing the goals of care is a euphemism for moving from treatment that seeks to cure to treatment that seeks to comfort--but goals of care discussions ought to be far more than that.

Then there's Butler's curious discussion of why you should cultivate a network of friendships in old age and find ways to remain engaged with life. Both are decidedly beneficial, as Butler asserts, but not just because they will prove useful “later on.” Relationships and engagement are ways to find meaning in life after the children have grown up and moved away and after retirement. This is yet another instance of the author seeming to understand what’s important as people age but then backsliding into thinking it’s important only as a means to assuring a good death. Befriending your neighbor can be rewarding in and of itself, not just so she will buy groceries for you when you are too ill to do so yourself.

Butler does an admirable job of conveying some of the main insights of geriatrics and palliative care. She understands, for instance, that the hospital is often a perilous environment for an older person, leading to loss of some of the functions most critical to remaining independent. She recognizes that physicians often focus on the benefits of medical technology, whether an implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD) or an artificial heart valve, and fail to consider their risks. She rightly identifies home care programs, advance care planning, and enrollment in hospice as potentially life-enhancing strategies. But then she makes statements about medicine that are at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. For example, she says that “Benadryl and the sleeping pills are…anticholinergics, an insidious group of commonly prescribed drugs that befuddle thinking and substantially increase the likelihood of developing dementia.” Yes, anticholinergics can result in delirium, a form of acute, reversible confusion. But dementia? 

Butler goes on, a few pages later, to report on a “landmark study” that found that people who used anticholinergics heavily were 50 percent more likely than those who took few to develop dementia. What she doesn’t say is that it’s very misleading to cite relative risk rather than absolute risk: going from a risk of 1 in a 100 to a risk of 1.5 in a 100 constitutes a 50 percent increase in risk, but the outcome in question remains very rare. She doesn’t say that this study lumped many different medications with anticholinergic activity together, including a variety of drugs that are no longer in widespread use, such as the tricyclic antidepressants. She also does not mention that drugs that block acid production (the proton pump inhibitors such as Prilosec and Prevacid) have also been associated, statistically, with developing dementia, and so have anti-anxiety agents. Is it really the case that all these drugs “cause” dementia? Or might it be that people who take certain kinds of drugs—perhaps because they are already exhibiting the earliest signs of dementia—are more likely to go on and develop the full-blown disease? Before jumping to conclusions, observational studies of the kind Butler cites (as opposed to a randomized controlled trial) need to be replicated or, ideally, followed up with a study in which some people are given anticholinergics for a given condition and others, chosen at random, are given something else. 

To be fair, the author of the “landmark study” has gone on to carry out many other observational studies. Her most recent report on this subject appeared in the British Medical Journal last year partially confirmed her earlier findings. But expert analysis of this paper is mixed. At best, it is reasonable to conclude that anticholinergic medications might be a risk factor for dementia.

The Art of Dying Well has much to offer. I only wish it had been more scrupulously reviewed by geriatricians before publication.

The Truth About Hospice

Hospice is widely touted as the best form of care near the end of life. As a result, the proportion of people who are enrolled in hospice at the time of death has been steadily increasing. Nearly half of all Medicare patients are receiving hospice care at the time of death. But a new report suggests that the quality of care they receive may not be what it should be. Moreover, a chunk of the $16.7 billion that Medicare spends on hospice (that was in 2016; it's more today) goes towards care that is unnecessary or not provided at all. What exactly is the problem? How widespread is it and how can patients and families identify hospices that provide high quality care?

While substandard care and fraudulent billing are distributed throughout the country, these practices occur disproportionately in the 64 percent of hospices that are for-profit. The bad behavior predominantly involves two specific variants of hospice care: general inpatient hospice care and hospice services that are provided within institutions, whether skilled nursing facilities or assisted living facilities. General inpatient care is an intensive form of care offered when symptom control cannot be achieved elsewhere (ie at home], so the patient is transferred to a hospital or skilled nursing facility. For this type of care, Medicare pays a per diem rate of $720, compared to $187 for home hospice (actually this is the rate for days 1-60, after that, the rate drops to $147 per day). The kinds of abuses that have been reported are indeed disturbing: the report gives several examples.

However,  General Inpatient Care accounts for only 1.5 percent of all the days that patients were enrolled in hospice. 

Other cases of allegedly inappropriate billing take place in Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF) or in Assisted Living Facilities (ALF). Some instances were unequivocally fraudulent, as when hospices paid facilities to enroll patients in hospice, sometimes without the knowledge of patients or their families.  But again, it’s important to keep this in perspective.  A minority of hospice patients are cared for in these environments: 25 percent of hospice beneficiaries during the period the study examined (2006-2016) lived in a SNF and only 13 percent in an ALF.

Several of the criticisms leveled by the report are of questionable significance. The study says that many hospices fail to develop the mandatory “comprehensive care plan,” a document that spells out what services the patient needs and how they will be provided. This failing was especially egregious in the inpatient setting, where in 85 percent of cases, no such plan was documented. But the absence of a written plan doesn’t mean there was no plan or that inadequate care was provided. It means just what it says—the hospice did not create the requisite piece of paper. Maybe, just maybe, they thought it was a waste of time, a meaningless bureaucratic requirement.

Hospice care is also criticized for failing to provide physician visits. Actually, hospice does provide one physician visit. A face to face visit with a physician at the time of admission to hospice has been mandatory since 2011, so hospice patients do see a physician at least once during their hospice stay, which in many cases is short: over half of all hospice patients are enrolled for less than 30 days, and over one-fourth are enrolled for a week or less. Many hospice patients and their families would like more involvement of the medical profession, particularly their primary care physician or the relevant specialist, but that’s different from suggesting that the quality of care was poor because there were no medical visits at all.

Skilled nursing facilities are accused of double dipping, of billing Medicare for services that they already routinely provide as part of their usual care. This has been a worry since Medicare agreed to cover hospice care in a SNF. Care by nurses and nurses’ aides are a normal component of nursing home care. But that doesn’t mean that the services offered by hospice are redundant; on the contrary, the reason that hospice can be beneficial in the SNF environment is precisely because the usual nurses may not be skilled in pain management and the amount of aide time may be totally inadequate for a dying patient.

Lastly, the report argues that the payment system incentivizes hospices to minimize services and to cherry pick patients, selecting low-need, long-stay patients, such as those with advanced dementia, rather than high-need, short-stay patients, such as those imminently dying of cancer. We’ve known about this phenomenon for some time. In fact, CMS responded by modifying its payment system to pay more for the first few days of care and for the last few days of care and less for the in-between days. The practice of complementing high-cost patients with low-cost patients is only a problem if the low-cost patients don’t deserve to be enrolled in hospice at all. If they do, and there’s every reason to think they do, then it’s simply a good business strategy. Hospitals do the same thing when they add services for which they are generally reimbursed well to compensate for the services for which they are poorly reimbursed. The alternative would be to abandon the per diem payment system and go to fee-for-service. But that’s the model that is gradually fading away from the rest of the medical system because it promotes the use of volume rather than quality.

What should we conclude about hospice care in America? How should prospective patients respond to this report and how should Medicare respond? 

Patients and their families would do well to consult Hospice Compare, the CMS website, for basic information about quality. This tool relies principally on patient and family satisfaction surveys rather than objective measures, but it’s very revealing. Rather than add more measures, which is what the authors of the report propose,  I think the tool should be publicized: I was familiar with Hospital Compare and Nursing Home Compare, but I confess I did not know about Hospice Compare until recently--and the site was launched in August, 2017. 

If families have a choice between a not-for-profit hospice and a for-profit hospice, they may find it prudent to select the not-for-profit option.  On average, not-for-profit facilities are associated with higher quality care. 

As to steps that Medicare should take, increased across the board regulation, which is what the report advocates, seems unduly burdensome. Far wiser would be to target enhanced supervision and regulation to those areas that need it most, namely skilled nursing facilities and assisted living facilities. Stiffer penalties for malfeasance would also be wise. As with banking fraud, it’s not enough to slap the owner or executive director on the wrist. Jail time is a much more powerful disincentive to bad behavior. And the bad behavior we’re talking about here is neglecting people who are dying and in pain.

Us or Them?

Nearly 30 years have passed since Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, enthroning advance care planning as an important part of care in the last phase of life. While the frequency with which patients designate someone to serve as their proxy in the event of incapacity has increased dramatically and the use of various planning instruments such as living wills and instructional directives has also risen, in most settings no more than one-third of patients with serious illness actually have conversations with their physicians about their preferences. 

Assuming that it’s a good idea for patients with serious illnesses to speak with their physicians about their goals of care, whose responsibility is it to raise the question? Does it make more sense to concentrate on educating physicians to communicate well about goals or to focus on empowering patients? 

Over the years, different initiatives have targeted one population or the other. The Robert Wood Johnson’s “Project on Death in America,” a multi-hundred-million-dollar project launched in 1994, focused to a large extent on prospective patients. The AMA’s program, “Education on Palliative and End-of-Life Care” (EPEC), also introduced in the 1990s, is targeted entirely to physicians (in fact, the “P” in the title used to refer to physicians: when first launched, the program was called “Educating Physicians on End-of-Life Care”.) More recently, a series of videos by Angelo Volandes of ACP Decisions aims to show patients and their families what various medical treatments entail, while the “Serious Illness Conversation Guide” from Susan Block, Atul Gawande and others at Ariadne Labs offers a checklist of questions to help physicians structure their discussions.

So, who needs more attention, the doctors or the patients? A new study in Health Affairs may offer some clues. I should point out at the outset that the Health Affairs article does not seek to weigh in on the question of whether to concentrate on physicians or on patients when designing interventions to promote advance care planning. The aim of the study, as indicated by its ponderous title, “Factors Contributing to Geographic Variation in End-of-Life Expenditures for Cancer Patients,” is to understand why some regions of the US spend so much more on care near the end of life than other reasons, with no discernible difference in outcomes. 

There are methodological problems with this study, as with all studies that start with death and work backwards—it is possible that although the people who died had similar outcomes (perhaps not surprising, as they all died), other people who weren’t considered in the study because they didn’t die were more likely to do well if more money was spent on them. Nonetheless, we have two groups of people with advanced lung or colorectal cancer on whom very different amounts of money were spent—in the lowest quintile, the average outlay was $10,131 and in the highest quintile, the average expenditure was $19,318). Was the decision to spend more coming from patient pressure or was it something that physicians were pushing for?

What the authors found was that in the high spending areas, physicians were less knowledgeable about treating dying patients (by their self-report), less comfortable providing care to patients near the end of life, and had less favorable attitudes toward hospice than their counterparts in the low spending areas. The high spending areas also tended to have more specialty physicians but fewer primary care physicians, as well as fewer hospices (per capita) than elsewhere. But—and here’s the key—patients’ beliefs about what they wanted were no different in high and low-spending areas.

All the statistically significant findings were in the domain of physicians, not patients:

Now, this finding does not directly translate into the question of who drives decision-making near the end of life in general and advance care planning discussions in particular. But it strongly suggests that physicians play an outsized role in shaping what happens to patients. Many patients don’t have pre-determined preferences; their values do not unambiguously determine what kind of medical treatment they should get. Or, if they do have some idea of what would be best for them, they are nonetheless strongly influenced by the views of their physicians. If “shared decision-making” is to work, both partners need to be informed and on board—and the physicians are particularly in need of some attention.

Where We Die

Honoring patient preferences, which is shorthand for providing an approach to medical treatment consistent with what patients say they want, has become a fundamental tenet of American medicine. And one preference that the vast majority of Americans share, according to multiple studies, is the wish to die at home. 

Whether dying at home is actually what patients want when they are faced with impending death, rather than an abstract preference expressed when they are healthy, is another matter—and I’ve previously argued that as hospital-based palliative care improves and home-based palliative care places an ever-growing burden on families, hospitals have become more attractive as a site for dying. But what patients tend to agree on is that they don’t want to suffer as they are dying.

To the extent that hospital care entails interventions such as ventilators or ICU treatment or chemotherapy, patients are reluctant to subject themselves to this type of care, especially if its likelihood of prolonging life is remote. To the extent that fewer hospital deaths and more home deaths is a marker for less suffering at the end of life, change in this direction is very desirable. A new study by Teno and colleagues shows we are continuing to make progress in this direction.

A few years ago, Teno et al performed a similar study comparing the experience of patients in 2000 to the comparable experience in 2009. What they found then was a marked decrease in the percentage of elderly Medicare fee- for-service decedents (health-policy-speak for people over age 65 with conventional Medicare who died) who expired in the hospital (32.6 percent vs 24.6 percent). Over the same period, however, they found ICU use increased among decedents in the last month of life (from 24.3 percent to 29.2 percent) as did the percentage of dying patients who underwent a transition of care (nursing home to hospital, for example) in the last 3 days of life (10.3 percent to 14.2 percent). The current study updates these findings by extending the period of analysis to 2015 and by adding data from older patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage programs, who now account for 30 percent of the Medicare population.

What they discovered today was that the proportion of hospital deaths among the fee-for-service group has continued to fall, going from 32.6 percent in 2000 to 24.6 percent in 2009 to 19.8 percent in 2015. ICU use in the last 30 days of life, which had risen between 2000 and 2009, remained stable at the 2009 level in 2015. Transitions to another site of care in the last 3 days of life, which had also risen between 2000 and 2009, went back down in 2015 to the same level as in 2000. And the chance of being enrolled in hospice at the time of death rose from 21.6 percent in 2000 to 50.4 percent in 2015. When the investigators looked at a sample of Medicare Advantage patients, they found these individuals had the same experience in 2015 as their fee-for-service counterparts.

What does all this mean? I suspect what it means is that when we know with a high degree of certainty that someone is going to die in the very near future, we tend to focus on comfort care. If physicians, patients, and families recognize that death is imminent, hospitalization is relatively unlikely, as is ICU care or transfers from home or nursing home to another site of care. However, physicians often cannot be so certain that death is likely to occur in the next few weeks or months. As long as the usual strategy is to pursue maximally aggressive care until death is virtually sure to occur in the immediate future, and then to abruptly transition to care focused exclusively on comfort, the picture we see today is likely to continue.

There is another approach. That approach involves opting for a goal that is neither comfort only nor life-prolongation at any cost. Instead, maximization of function is paramount; treatment aimed at prolonging life is also acceptable, provided it will not affect quality of life in a major way. So, too, is comfort a goal, but only to the extent that it does not conflict with maintaining function. For people who are frail, extremely old, or both this alternative strategy translates into fewer hospitalizations, fewer ICU stays, and fewer transitions of care in the final stage of life, whether that period is measured in weeks, months, or even years. 

Medical treatment does not have to be all or none; there is something in between. It’s quite possible that many people would opt for this type of care—if only they knew it existed.

Much Ado About CPR

Two short essays in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine present differing perspectives on how to treat a desperately ill woman w in the ICU of an American hospital, a woman who is unable to make her own decisions and has no advance directive. One author responded that the right course of action was to “institute a DNR order” and the other that it was to “continue full resuscitative measures,” setting up a quasi-debate. I say a quasi-debate because the two authors, as per the editor’s instructions, simply laid out their own arguments without responding to the other’s point of view. I know, because I am one of the two.

I asserted that the physician should declare the patient DNR—a woman with no written advance directive and no designated health care surrogate who was dying of multiple organ failure triggered by sepsis and unresponsive to maximal medical therapy. Attempted CPR in this setting, I argued, was as close to futile as medical treatment ever is; moreover, the patient had clearly stated to a friend and neighbor that she would not want aggressive measures when facing overwhelming odds. I stand by my arguments, which I won’t repeat here, but I regret that the discussion focused on the wrong question.

The wrong question is whether the patient should have a DNR status; the right question asks about the general treatment strategy rather than a specific medical intervention and about the process for deciding, not just the outcome of the process. It moves the discussion beyond considerations of futility—a debated that raged in the 1980s and ultimately led to the recognition that futility is meaningless without reference to what treatment is intended to accomplish. Maintaining a patient who is in a persistent vegetative state on artificial nutrition is futile if the goal is to restore her to full functioning as a thinking human being. But it’s entirely appropriate if the goal is to sustain life in the sense of a heart that beats and lungs that respire. Discussing how to make medical decisions for patients who have lost capacity and how to think about treatment for those who are dying allows us to discuss much more important decisions than whether or not to attempt CPR.

Ever since 1984, when a New York hospital was found guilty of putting purple dots on patients’ charts signaling that they were not to be resuscitated—without their knowledge or input or that of their next of kin—we’ve been obsessed with DNR orders. I suspect that more ink has been spilled on whether, when and why to write a DNR order than on any other medical decision. The reason, presumably, is that it seems irreversible: if a patient sustains a cardiac arrest and CPR isn’t performed, the patient will surely die. Other seemingly momentous decisions often prove not quite so momentous—even Karen Ann Quinlan, the first patient to bring the possibility of not intervening medically to public attention, lingered for nine years after her “life-sustaining” ventilator had been disconnected. A choice not to resuscitate is far more unambiguous—although CPR, it should be pointed out, is hardly a guarantee of life.

Cardiac arrest may have special cachet because it seems to divide the living from the dead. But in fact, for older patients who are critically ill, it is often merely the last step in what is often a relentless progression of markers on the way to death. From the perspective of human suffering and of doing good (and avoiding harm), other steps along the way are often far more significant. After all, a person whose heart has stopped and who is not breathing is no longer able to experience anything, neither the existential angst from awareness of imminent death nor the physical discomfort of aggressive treatment. The nurses and doctors who attempt CPR in a dying patient may feel guilty of assault; they often regard intubation, chest compressions, and electrical shocks as an undignified way to end life, but they are the ones experiencing malaise, not the patient.

Subjecting a patient who is in the final phase of life to dialysis for four hours a day, three times a week, or to major surgery to repair a damaged heart valve, or to ventilator care for advanced lung disease, by contrast, may cause pain and suffering to the person receiving treatment. Both the potential benefit of treatment (longer life) and its potential burdens (ranging from delirium and functional decline to a shorter life) are difficult to assess quantitatively. These decisions, which are difficult to make with a competent patient and correspondingly more fraught with an incapacitated patient, are the ones we should be discussing, not CPR.

Ironically, despite the now 42-year history of DNR orders, there is still confusion about whether DNR indicates that CPR will not be performed in the event of a cardiopulmonary arrest (as it is defined by the American College of Cardiology and other authorities) or something more. Indeed, the opposing piece in the New England Journal of Medicine talks about a time-limited trial of “continued resuscitative measures,” which presumably refers to ongoing ventilator treatment for respiratory failure, dialysis for kidney failure, and fluids and antibiotics for sepsis, rather than for a few minutes of attempted CPR. This uncertainty about what DNR means reflects another problem with the obsession with “getting the DNR order,” and that is the widespread belief that treatment decisions must be all-or-nothing: if you don’t want CPR, then surely you don’t want any potentially life-prolonging medical interventions. The reality is that many people don’t want burdensome treatments that are extremely unlikely to be beneficial, but that doesn’t mean they want to focus exclusively on comfort. 

There’s much more to discuss—I haven’t even touched on the process for making medical decisions. That includes not only who the surrogate should be in the event of decisional incapacity and what standard that surrogate should use for making decisions (substituted judgment is the usual standard, with best interests the back-up if no information about the patient’s preferences is available), but also how the discussion should unfold. Typically, physicians are so eager to reach a decision about what to do that they jump to this step in the process without first clarifying the patient’s underlying health state (in the NEJM vignette, the crucial bit of information is that the patient was dying), as though preferences are independent of any broader context. But for now, let me leave you with the thought that both medical decision-making and advance care planning involve much more than checking off items on a menu, and that if we do engage in intervention-specific planning, CPR should be low on the list of what we discuss.

A Shot of Irish Whiskey

I recently stumbled across The Way We Die Now in the new books section of my local library. I hadn’t heard of it or its author, the Irish gastroenterologist Seamus O’Mahony, and I couldn’t find any reviews in American publications. Intrigued, I checked it out. It’s one of the more insightful—and simultaneously annoying—-of the  long list of books about death and dying.

The author makes several observations that are worthy thinking about. First, he says that dying is inherently messy and distressing; our attempts to sanitize it with what he calls the “syringe-driver” (Britishese for a “pump,” a way to deliver opioids such as morphine intravenously or subcutaneously or even directly into the central nervous system in a continuous, steady fashion) or with physician assisted suicide are vain attempts at controlling the uncontrollable. Second, and on a related note, he mocks the insistence by some that dying should be an occasion for “personal growth;” there’s nothing uplifting about dying and it is seldom an opportunity for repairing longstanding personal rifts. Third, he derides all self-proclaimed “death experts,” by which he principally means palliative care physicians, although he regards proponents of “narrative medicine” as similarly tainted. While acknowledging some of the contributions of palliative medicine, such as better pain control and the development of inpatient hospices, he feels strongly that the medical care of the dying should remain in the hands of primary care physicians.

Death is messy: O’Mahony discusses the writings of several public intellectuals, Philippe Aries, Ernest Becker, and Ivan Illich, on this subject. Aries, writer of the monumental history, Western Attitudes Towards Death, O’Mahony describes as a “romantic reactionary who looked back to an idealized, pre-industrial past” because he yearns for a peaceful death, at home, surrounded by family. Becker, author of The Denial of Death, argues that fear of death is the essence of being human and that each individual must sublimate his or her “fear of extinction with heroic projects designed to transcend death.” And Illich, iconoclastic writer of Medical Nemesis, laments the medicalization of death, exhorting us to “learn to cope” with the external constraints on the human condition.

I also was deeply influenced by these three writers: Aries because the historical perspective helps us see that the way things are today isn’t necessarily the way things have to be; Becker because I agree that the idea of an “immortality project” is tremendously useful for those of us who are aware of our mortality and don’t believe in an afterlife; and Illich because he opened my eyes to the notion that our world is excessively medicalized. Thanks to Aries, I have sections on history in many of my books—including my forthcoming Old and Sick in America, where I use an historical perspective to demonstrate the power of the Medicare program to shape the experience of illness. In homage to Becker, I called my last book, The Denial of Aging. And one of my earliest articles, a critique of the modern nursing home, decries its medicalization. I share with O’Mahony the view that death today is over-medicalized, that we shouldn’t expect to control the exact time and course of our dying, and that the clergy (including secularly oriented chaplains) and social workers are as necessary as medical doctors.

Death isn’t an occasion for personal growth: It’s not just dying that isn’t an opportunity for personal growth. The whole idea of “personal growth” rubs me the wrong way, at least as embodied in the work of Abraham Maslow, with his claims about self-actualization, or the “desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” I’ve tended towards the view that each person should make the most of his or her own talents and abilities, and should seek satisfaction by applying those talents and abilities to improve the world. But whether or not self-actualization is every a desirable goal, surely it is too much to ask of someone who is dying that he or she continue to “grow.”

We shouldn’t leave death experts in charge: Palliative care increasingly sees itself as the specialty that is uniquely able to communicate, to break bad news, to help patients fill out advance directives, and to control pain and other symptoms. I am not as cynical as O’Mahony about the importance of communication and the possibility of physicians learning to be better at it—he drips with disdain as he asserts that “one of the more pernicious myths of modern medicine is the notion that a doctor with ‘communication skills’ and a sympathetic manner can somehow magically transmute bad news into something palatable…” Yet at the same time, he acknowledges that the “Liverpool Care Pathway,” an algorithm for caring for dying patients in British hospitals that was done away despite its many successes because of lapses in communication: “poor communication was at the root of virtually all complaints about the LCP.” And I think O’Mahony is mistaken when he ridicules the idea that breaking bad news is a special skill—the issue isn’t that when done well, patients accept the news with good grace; rather it’s that when done badly, patients feel abandoned, frightened, and angry. Finally, I share O’Mahony’s concerns about instructional advance directives—documents that purport to dictate exactly what medical procedure will be done in particular circumstances. He writes that “advance directives perpetuate an illusion that we can control, in minute detail, our treatment of an unpredictable illness at some unknown time in the future.” But to confound advance care planning, which can focus far more broadly on goals rather than on the specifics of treatment, with advance directives, that are either uselessly vague or excessively specific, is profoundly misguided. 

That said, I agree that palliative care principles—a view of the end of life as necessitating far more than just medical care, a belief that patients and families need information and guidance to be provided by a kind and compassionate professional, and a recognition that physical symptoms can often be ameliorated if not ablated---should be an essential part of what all doctors do.

So ignore the misunderstandings about the American health care system—O’Mahony says that nearly half of Americans die in hospice care because insurers discovered that “it saves money” and is seemingly unaware that this is predominantly home hospice, not institutional hospice, and that tthat the work from Mass General showing that early palliative care prolongs life in advanced cancer said nothing about cost. He likewise thinks that “in the US” death with dignity “has become a euphemism for euthanasia” (it hasn’t). Try not to mind the ridicule he heaps on both dignity therapy and narrative medicine, which he accuses of advocating that physicians take on a “quasi-sacerdotal role.” Appreciate instead the nuggets of truth: a physician’s job is the treatment of illness (not spiritual malaise or existential angst); the syringe-driver (or morphine pump) “allows for a softer, less frightening, final agony;” “palliative care should be at the center of what all doctors do;” and physicians should treat patients with kindness, courtesy, and yes, dignity.

Growth and Transcendence?

In 2003, I decided to branch out from geriatrics and try something new. Well, a little new. I recreated myself as a palliative care physician. I’d previously been a bit dubious about palliative care, which in its early days focused principally on people with cancer and almost exclusively on people who were imminently dying. My interest was in people who were in the last phase of life, whether that phase would last days, months, or even years. My patients at Hebrew Rehab Center, where I had worked for the previous eleven years, had an average age of 88. They all had major limitations in their ability to function independently, otherwise they wouldn’t have been living at Hebrew Rehab: either significant physical problems or, a large proportion of cases, cognitive dysfunction, or both. I had come to realize that many if not all of them stood to benefit from a palliative approach to medical care. So why not embrace palliative care as a specialty, focusing principally on very old people, but also expanding my horizons to include younger individuals?

Palliative care was a good fit for me. I came to see the field as built on three legs: advance care planning (some people include communication here), psychosocial support, and symptom management. It is an interdisciplinary field and its focus is on supporting patients and their families through a difficult period of their lives. Much of the work involves making sure people understand their condition and what they are facing so they can make realistic and wise decisions about the treatments they receive as well as about where and how they live. Many of my colleagues shied away from such discussions; I thrived on them, feeling I could help assure that patients got the kind of care that made sense for them as they approached the end of their lives. Often, I rescued them from needlessly burdensome and ultimately futile medical interventions. There was, however, one strand of palliative care that disturbed me.

What bothered me was the tendency to exalt dying, to see dying as an opportunity for growth and transcendence. Now, not all palliative care physicians, hospice nurses, and other professionals are afflicted by this tendency, but for some it was kind of a religion. The business of palliative care, in this view, is to promote spiritual growth. And by implication, patients who don’t find dying uplifting, who aren’t able to reach new heights or discover new aspects of themselves, are failures.

I confess that I’ve never been enthusiastic about the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, with his five (later nine) stages, culminating in “self-actualization,” or the experience of  “self-fulfillment” manifested by “peak growth experiences.” I’m even less enthusiastic about applying this model to people approaching the end of life.  Dying, and even living the last six or twelve or twenty-four months of life, is often a messy business. It seems to me to be good enough to be physically and emotionally reasonably comfortable. That’s hard enough to achieve. Ideally, it involves attaining a certain level of inner peace, of acceptance of the life one has led. But growth experiences? Euphoria? Joy? Wonder? That seems a bit much. So I was pleased to read the article in the Sunday NY Times about B.J. Miller, a palliative care physician who is a triple amputee and who until recently served as executive director of the “quirky” Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.

Miller is by all accounts a remarkable doctor and human being. He is charismatic. He is intense. He has the capacity to truly “be” with people and help them come to terms with their condition and their lives. His story, well told by journalist Jon Mooallem, is inspiring. But he isn’t big on transcendence. In his own words, palliative care in general and Zen Hospice in particular aren’t about our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience: “Most people aren’t having these transformative deathbed moments. And if you hold that out as a goal, they’re just going to feel like they’re failing.” Instead, the name of the game is to allow those who are dying and the people who love them to “live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together.” Now that’s a philosophy that makes sense.

American medicine is best at taking care of people who have a single, very serious disease. We’re even better at taking care of them when they are in the throes of an exacerbation of that disease, when we can control everything that goes into their bodies and monitor whatever comes out, usually in the acute care hospital, often in the ICU. That means, for example, patients with severe heart failure who develop acute pulmonary edema, or people with leukemia who are in “blast crisis.” People who have multiple interacting conditions or one disease that isn’t necessarily fulminant but affects many aspects of their daily lives—those are the people we’re not so good at taking care of. And it turns out that these ill-defined groups of people not only get mediocre medical care, but they also cost the health care system a great deal of money.

It’s finally become clear to a number of influential health policy types that this group deserves attention—doing a better job caring for them could potentially improve health and save money. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund, recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine saying it was time we paid attention to “high need, high cost” patients. CTAC, the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, just held a national forum on “advanced illness care,” advocating payment and delivery reform of the most vulnerable patients. CAPC, the Center for Advancing Palliative Care, has for a number of years promoted the use of “an added layer of support” for patients with “serious illness” throughout the course of their disease. But how can we identify just who it is who stands to benefit from the kind of care that all these groups recognize as crucial: integrated, coordinated, team-based, and patient-centered care?

Our neighbors to the north have long recognized the importance of frailty as a concept that gets at what’s common to people with multiple co-morbidities, patients with one advanced illness, and some patients who have dementia or mental illness. What’s unique about frailty is that it identifies patients who are vulnerable to external stresses. It doesn’t matter whether the vulnerability arises from the interaction between several different medical conditions or the effects of a single disease on many bodily functions; it’s the precariousness of their condition that makes frail people both difficult and costly to care for. 

Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, together with colleagues at Dalhousie University in Canada, has developed a powerful Clinical Frailty Scale that categorizes patients based on a mixture of disease burden and function. Studies show the Clinical Frailty Scale can predict decline and mortality among community dwelling older individuals; it can predict unplanned hospitalization and death in outpatients with cirrhosis; and it can predict length of stay in older patients admitted to the acute medical service of a general hospital. But a Google search fails to turn up a single article in which the CFS is used in a US hospital. It’s been tried in Australia. It’s used in Canada. But not the US. Why not?

Let’s have a look at the CFS. I think it offers some clues:

Two observations about the scale. First, although the outcome is quantitative (every patient gets a score between 1 and 9), the assessment that goes into determining the outcome is fundamentally qualitative. Second, and not unrelated, there’s no way the score can be computed from information already entered into an electronic medical record. That’s because the rating is not based on things like the serum albumin or the mini-mental score. It’s based on one person, a clinician, deciding which of 9 very short, illustrated descriptions best fits another person. There’s nothing complicated about the process—a good primary care physician be sufficiently knowledgeable about his patient to determine the answer without asking doing any kind of special evaluation, and even a not-so-good primary care physician should be able to find out enough to choose the best description after 1 or 2 minutes of questioning. But introducing the CFS into the practice of medicine in the US would require physicians to be aware of their patients’ level of functioning in everyday life, not just the functioning of their individual organs. And it would require accepting the notion that sometimes qualitative reasoning trumps the quantitative. Both concepts are alien to standard American medicine.

CTAC and CAPC and all those others who argue that we need to do a better job caring for our most medically vulnerable patients—for the sake of their well-being and for the sake of our pocketbook—argue about what exactly is wrong with the patients they want to serve. Are they dying? Do they have lots of problems? Are they suffering from advanced illness? I would argue it's not just people who are dying, though many of the most vulnerable are dying. It’s not just people with multi-morbidity, though many of the vulnerable do in fact have multiple conditions. And it’s not just those with advanced illness, though many of the most vulnerable have an advanced illness. It’s people whose illness(es) affect sufficiently many aspects of their daily functioning that they have become frail. 

Frailty is the final common pathway, whether you're frail because of dementia or metastatic cancer or Parkinson's disease or some combination of arthritis, diabetes, and COPD. So let’s borrow from our northern neighborhood and begin using the Clinical Frailty Scale. It’s really very simple.