Medical Society of New York Fights Palliative Care Information Act Despite Mounting Evidence

A new bill instructs physicians to discuss a prognosis with seriously ill patients and ask if they would like information on hospice, palliative care and appropriate end-of-life options.
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The ink of Governor Paterson's signature is barely dry on New York's Palliative Care Information Act (PCIA), drafted and sponsored by Compassion & Choices and its New York affiliate, yet evidence mounts daily for its vast and dramatic impact on end-of-life care. I predict this bill will shift decision-making authority radically from physicians to patients, and dwarf the impact of the Oregon and Washington Death with Dignity bills that, themselves, sent tremors through Medicine over the last thirteen years.

The PCIA merely instructs physicians to discuss a prognosis with seriously ill patients and ask if they would like information on hospice, palliative care and appropriate end-of-life options. But this simple requirement runs counter to an endemic medical culture that keeps prognoses secret and imposes painful, intensive technology on uninformed, dying patients.

Evidence of woefully uninformed patients has been clear for years. In 2002 researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine that even if patients with cancer requested survival estimates, physicians would provide a frank estimate only 37% of the time. These authors reported "In general, we found that the propensity to avoid frank disclosure was relatively homogeneously distributed among patients and physicians. That is, most types of physicians tend to avoid frank disclosure for most types of patients with cancer." In 2008 only 16% of oncologists told researchers they would discuss a terminal prognosis, even "if my patients ask about it."

The Palliative Care Information Act changes all that. The duty to offer information arises when the physician perceives a patient is likely to die within six months, with or without disease-focused treatment. Having an affirmative duty will force the analysis of prognosis, and prompt the conversation 83% of patients say they want.

I would remind anyone squeamish about state lawmakers telling doctors how to practice medicine that the medical establishment is notoriously protective of its prerogatives of secrecy and dominance in the doctor-patient relationship. Organized medicine does not willingly assign decision-making power to mere patients. We would not have the doctrine of informed consent were it not for courts asserting the right for patients to understand alternatives and risks prior to consenting to surgery and other procedures. The 1972 D.C. Appellate case Canterbury v. Spence, first set forth the duty to inform. We would have no standards for the scope of pre-consent information, were it not for state legislatures codifying informed consent requirements throughout the nation.

The Medical Society of New York apparently sensed a threat in the PCIA and vehemently opposed it. In an embarrassingly revealing letter to colleagues, Society president Leah McCormack deplores the destructive impact palliative care information will have on "a patient's spirit." Dr. McCormack asserts, "Mandating physicians to offer terminally ill patients information about end-of-life care options may undermine patients' beliefs and convictions that they can prevail against the disease and could undercut their confidence in the course of treatment and in their physician."

Recall the conversation Dr. McCormack rejects occurs only after the physician determines the patient will die within six months, regardless of choice of therapy. So it seems her preference would be to withhold prognostic information, raise false hope for cure and entice patients by promoting "confidence" in therapies of ever-diminishing benefit. All the while she would withhold information about palliative therapies shown to prolong life by an average of three months in lung cancer patients. And she would do this in the service of the patient's 'spirit' --- or rather, in the service of her particular beliefs about the patient's spirit.

A physician presuming to know the needs of my spirit, and acting on that presumption, is a scary prospect. I think it would scare most patients, dying or not. And as if to underscore the legitimacy of this fear, last month's Journal of General Internal Medicine includes a study entitled "How Well Do Doctors Know Their Patients?" Centering on health beliefs, it reveals doctors to be generally clueless about their patients' beliefs and values. A sample of 29 physicians and 207 patients from 10 clinics demonstrates physicians' perceptions of their patients' beliefs are usually wrong, because physicians assume their patients' beliefs align with their own.

All this research underscores the finding published three years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine that 40 million Americans receive care from physicians who don't believe they are obligated to disclose information about medically available treatments they consider objectionable. One hundred million have doctors who feel no obligation to refer them to another provider for such treatments. Total sedation at the end of life emerged as one such treatment likely to be kept secret from patients. Compassion & Choices' pursuit of laws protecting patients from such "doctors of conscience" began with that study.

This modest Palliative Care Information Act certainly has its work cut out for it. The habits, culture, presumptions and prerogatives of a powerful profession conspire to keep dying patients uninformed, even as they endure needless suffering from a futile, aggressive and brutal battle against mortality. As it happens, New York is exactly the place to start. Graduate medical education is big business in New York, where giant teaching hospitals establish medical practice patterns of a lifetime. At least one in six American physicians receives their training there. Now that training will include the duty to start a conversation about realistic prognosis, palliative care and end-of-life decisions. This gives me hope.

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