Are Americans Overtreated to Death

Continued from Yesterday

Yet the numbers show that's not what is happening:

-The average time spent in hospice and palliative care, which stresses comfort and quality of life once an illness is incurable, is falling because people are starting it too late. In 2008, one-third of people who received hospice care had it for a week or less, says the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

-Hospitalizations during the last six months of life are rising: from 1,302 per 1,000 Medicare recipients in 1996 to 1,441 in 2005, Dartmouth reports. Treating chronic illness in the last two years of life gobbles up nearly one-third of all Medicare dollars.

"People are actually now sicker as they die," and some find that treatments become a greater burden than the illness was, said Dr. Ira Byock, director of palliative care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Families may push for treatment, but "there are worse things than having someone you love die," he said.

Gail Sheehy, author of the "Passages" books, learned that as her husband, New York magazine founder Clay Felker, spent 17 years fighting various cancers. On New Year's Day 2007, they waited eight hours in an emergency room for yet another CT scan until Felker looked at her and said, "No more hospitals."

"I just put a cover over him and wheeled him out of there with needles still in his arms," Sheehy said.

Then she called Dr. R. Sean Morrison, president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and a doctor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

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