The Price of Denial

The New York Times' New Old Age Blog summarizes a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Patients with advanced cancer who reported having EOL conversations with physicians generally opted for comfort, or palliative, care at home or in a hospice.  This had several significant benefits:

• Less physican distress and a better quality of death;
• Significantly lower health care costs in their final week of life; and
• As much (and sometimes more) time at the end-of-life as those never talked about their end-of-life (and were likely to be resuscitated, intubated or put in intensive care)