[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[Henrik Ohrstrom]

Triage is done all the time, always.
Giving all patients all possible treatment all the time is akin to torture
your patients (and in insurance based jurisdictions, making them pay for
the "fun" of being treated to death too)
I work with anesthesia and intensive care, palliative pain medicine and to
some extent chronic pain.
No one should get more "care" than is needed for a good death. That's
torture.
Everyone should get enough care for a good life, that's good care.
The old and demented should not be in intensive care units. That is not the
same as not giving them state of the art care and treatment. But as long as
we are far from any useful or accepted cryogenic treatment, no-ones life
should be turned into a "well-meaning" treatment to death.
Sometimes success in reviving a stopped heart in the ER haunts you for many
years with the living ghost that keeps coming back for more suffering year
after year.
There are a couple of patients for whom I really really regret the
"success" in the ER.
Try to explain this to your average politician. :(

/Henrik


Den sön 25 okt. 2020 19:47William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> skrev:

> It's called triage, isn't it? Deciding on who gets first treatment.  How
> about some 80 something year old who is going to die soon anyway versus a
> much younger person who, if treated, could have many years left.  I know
> who I would treat.  I remember a chart showing how much is spent on health
> care as a function of age, and it's very positively accelerated.  Most of
> the money is spent in the last couple of years of one's life.  Well, I want
> my treatment too, but not at the cost of not treating a younger person.  In
> fact (I think now - who knows what I will think later) I will turn down
> expensive treatments which will only keep me alive for a few months
> longer.
>
> bill w
>
> I think we need Rafal in on this one.  Where did he go?
>
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 1:18 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 5:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> > What happened to tough love?
>>
>> Tough love is more a battle cry of conservatives when they want to
>> ignore some problem, no?
>>
>> > OK, so some people are not happy. Too damned bad.  It will cost
>> > lives if we loosen a lot.  There are times when we should ignore
>> > our empathy and do the right thing, and this is one of them.   bill w
>>
>> But Bill K is saying some of the shift in attention to COVID is
>> costing lives. One would have to decide here what's more important:
>> reducing deaths from COVID versus reducing deaths from these other
>> causes. Utilitarians might argue whichever saves more lives is the
>> better policy.
>>
>> This reminds me of a scenario once laid out by a Navy psychiatrist in
>> a debate here in Seattle. He said some healthcare workers argued
>> against taking alcoholics into the ER (A&E) because, after all, they
>> (the alcoholics) did it to themselves, so it's their own fault if
>> they're sick. That sounds like 'tough love.' The psychiatrist pointed
>> out that the same argument might be made for many patients in the ER.
>> the guy with the heart attack probably brought it on through a
>> sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. The kid with the compound fracture
>> from rock-climbing shouldn't have been taking those risks. Etc. They
>> did it to themselves, in a manner of speaking: their life choices
>> helped put them in the ER. But would you argue they're taking up
>> valuable healthcare resources that might be better used for patients
>> who didn't do it to themselves? (And who would those be? The list
>> would be fairly short, I think.)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Dan
>>   Sample my Kindle books via:
>> http://author.to/DanUst
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