Showing posts with label surrogates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surrogates. Show all posts
Friday, March 09, 2012
Weighing the Chances at Life's End - NYTimes.com
Weighing the Chances at Life's End - NYTimes.com
"........But the grimmer the prognosis, the more inaccurate and more optimistic the surrogates’ responses became. Only 22 percent correctly interpreted a statement about what a “5 percent chance of surviving” meant, while 65 percent answered with greater optimism.
“They clearly grasped the meaning of these statements,” Dr. White said. “They were not misunderstanding the numbers. They weren’t misunderstanding the language.” If that had been the case, you’d expect them to have been inaccurate about good news, too.
Instead, relatives hearing doctors deliver dire prognoses just didn’t accept or believe them. They displayed, in medspeak, “a systematic optimism bias.”
Such bias has shown up many times before in the medical literature. Cancer patients enrolled in early phases of clinical trials, for instance,....."
add your opinions
communication
,
end of life
,
prognosis
,
surrogates
,
survival estimates
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