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Introduction Terminology
Relationships with anyone Relationships with doctors
Desires … … leading to Care Systems Closing phase of life
Lessons learned Random statistics
If, three years from now, you share responsibility for a loved-on whose mind and/or body is falling apart, you will wish that today you had started to learn about that.
In 2022, the current state-of-the-art is the book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Dr Atul Gawande. ◦ The book is about our struggle to cope with the constraints of human biology. Where our current medical power to control that is finite.
This article is basically my notes from this book. [Notes from me alone appear below in square brackets.]
Perhaps someday, there will be better materials. But today, this is what I know:
ADL Activities of Daily Living:
IADL Instrumental Activities of Daily Living:
Really 👂︎ listen to people:
Relationships between doctors and patients [parents and children?]:
Questions may come from fear – answer them.
The job of doctors is to enable wellbeing, where wellbeing is about whatever reasons that person wishes to be alive, at whatever stage of life that person happens to be, at that time.
Socioemotional selectivity theory:
Terminally-ill people want to:
Thus, we attempted to create care systems that lets people do this …
Standard medical care treatment priority:
Hospice treatment priority:
Job of any doctor [or 3-Stage Retirement Village 3SRV ] is to:
Three Plagues of Nursing Home Existence:
Eating alone is not very stimulating.
The chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.
Remember the narrowing focus, to here and now – the people and experiences near us.
A mounting series of crises, from which medicine can offer only temporary rescue.
[With 📱︎☎ 911, or] in the 🏥︎ ER/ED or hospital, you may lose all control over your care:
Review sections on Hospice treatment priorities ↑ above, and Lessons learned ↓ below.
[ 📅︎ Way ahead of time, we should:
[Do not fear the ▦ mediset, which I prefer to call a pill-sorter. Starting too early is way better than starting too late.
[Do not fear the walker. They are terrific. Starting too early is way better than starting too late.
[We are all only temporarily-abled. — Source unknown, I heard it a long time ago. Although on 2018-10-02, I heard Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee say that ⚕︎ doctors understand very well that they will soon be on the other side of the exam table.] [Lesson Learned: Design everything for your future self: ◦ Build your websites with text large-enough, contrast high-enough, and all that accessibility stuff. ◦ Design/acquire/modify your 🏠︎ home with your ♿ future abilities and limitations in mind. ◦ Etc.]
[Search carefully for 3SRVs. TODO: write this section.]
63% of doctors overestimate future survival time, by an average of 530%! Only 17% of doctors underestimate future survival time.
Risk factors for falling (and breaking your hip):
Cancer costs are U-shaped:
25% of Medicare spending is for 5% of patients, in their final year of life.
More than half of those living in 3-Stage Retirement Villages 3SRVs run through their savings.
🏠︎ 🏠︎ home page
--Eric Piehl comments on web care.html v1.0.8.3 2022-07-22, copyright © 2022 by Eric Piehl.