5 ms·

> The population to whom this statistic doesn’t apply is doctors—they know when the marginal benefit of treatment isn’t worth it. I would really like to have a

• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  It holds in survey results but has not been conclusively demonstrated in treatment data. It does not hold in Medicare data, but those could be limited for this population. "In a Stanford study, 88 percent of responding physicians said they would avoid invasive procedures and life-prolonging machines. But a newly released comparative study of Medicare recipients, as well as a longitudinal study and separate analysis of Medicare data published in January, suggest that the actual differences between end-of-life treatments that doctors and nondoctors receive are slight." The other data point is the story of "La Crosse, Wisconsin," which "spends less on health care for patients at the end of life than any other place in the country, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas" [2]. The cause? "Some 96 percent of people who die in La Crosse have an advance directive or similar documentation" while "nationally, only about 30 percent of adults have a document like that." [1] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/at-the-end-of-life-what-would-doctors-do/ https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/at-the-end-of-life... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/03/05/286126451/living-wills-are-the-talk-of-the-town-in-la-crosse-wis https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/03/05/286126451/livi...