Often doctors as well as families sense that matters were left unfinished when someone dies after a long illness, according to a survey of clinicians, patients, and family members in the Seattle area.
By providing a sense of closure, a phone call or letter may be as important to you as to the family, especially if you had a long relationship with the patient, suggests the report in Archives of Internal Medicine.
The article also offers ways to address a patient’s fear of abandonment at the stage when care becomes palliative.
A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association provides language to use (or not use) when all treatment options have played out.
For instance: It suggests alternative wording for “There’s nothing more we can do.” (Strictly speaking, this is not true.)
Practical Articles/News
In this article category, the search term end-of-life offers practical advice from fellow physicians on how to manage the most difficult phase of care.
Recent searches in All of Medicine
This may be a newly recognized adverse effect of vancomycin.
Scroll down to find a new review from Pediatrics about how to identify the signs of Lyme disease in children with arthritic symptoms.
IN THE JOURNALS
Find what’s new and learn more about it
New results from a multinational study suggest an association between metabolic syndrome and cognitive impairment in older women. The study appears in the Archives of Neurology.
A full-text article in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine offers primary care physicians a “simple, easy-to-learn, unified approach” to managing common anxiety disorders.
Other guidance for effective management of anxiety disorders appears in Consultant.
NOTEWORTHY SEARCH of the week
What have other doctors been looking at?
Someone sent positive feedback about this result, found using the search term cutaneous lupus erythematosus.
Positive or not, there’s a serious flaw with this search. It’s worthy of your attention. (See the TIP below.)
RESULT: Current Treatment of Cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus
Dermatology Online Journal
TIP: This result, entitled “Current Treatment,” was published in 2001. Relevant, undoubtedly, but hardly current.
Don’t overlook the words “Prioritize results by publication date,” immediately below the taxicab-yellow box containing the word “Search.” In the search above, that box was un-checked for some reason.
Unless you intend otherwise (and for a good reason), the box next to those words should have a check mark in it. Including publication date in ranking results is the default setting in SearchMedica, to ensure that you see the most recent information relevant to your search term.
We tried the same search term with a check mark in the box. The results direct you to 6 articles and an editorial on the subject in Archives of Dermatology as well as a review in Consultant, all published last month.
Why would anyone ever choose to disable ranking by publication date? In some cases, a publication date is not recorded in the coding when good content is put live on the Internet. For example, many authoritative patient brochures, including all online information from the Merck Manual, are visible in the article category “Patient Education” only when the publication date option is de-selected.
But don’t forget to reactivate it afterwards, when you continue searching the journals.
