Word: patient
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...committee on Optimum Care to the Hopelessly Ill at Mass General should be commended for its efforts to produce explicit guidelines for doctors when deciding such cases. Its recommendations, which were accepted by the hospital in September, advise that patients whose brains do not function and who show no prospect of recovery should be taken off expensive life support measures. The report argues that if a patient has no brain function--even if he breathes and has a pulse--he is dead. The committee accepted as its criteria for death the Harvard standard, developed by a committee at the Medical...
Those procedures include labelling a patient "DNR," for "Do Not Resuscitate." DNR refers specifically to the prospect of cardiac or pulmonary arrest in a dying patient, and when a patient is designated DNR, it means that he is not to be resuscitated if he suffers an arrest...
Resuscitating a patient may cost a hospital as much as $1000, and can mean committing that patient to intensive care at even more cost...
...designation is part of what doctors say is a larger pattern of nonaggressive treatment of moribund patients. "You have a patient, 90 years old, with metastatic cancer; he's dying. What DNR means to physicians is, 'Look fellas, no heroics. Let the poor guy die in peace,"' Dr. Mitchell T. Rabkin, '51, associate professor of medicine and general director of the Beth Israel Hospital, says...
Gerber says that the decision is a real burden, that he ends up having to "judge the quality of a patient's life...