First ever invited commentary in a medical journal — JAMA-IM

I’m going to be proud for a moment. Yesterday, the journal JAMA-Internal Medicine published an invited commentary that I co-wrote with Dr. Dan Matlock (@Dan_Matlock) from the University of Colorado. The title of the piece is The Antidote for Unprepared Patients — A Caring Clinician. It’s available for free. Invited editorials in medical journals are often used to emphasize or clarify impactful scientific articles. The study that Dan and I commented on was a retrospective review of the Features and Outcomes of Patients Who Underwent Cardiac Device Deactivation. (Also available for free.) The Mayo Clinic team of researchers found that patients with cardiac devices were unprepared for end of life. Deactivation decisions often fell to surrogates, occurred in close proximity to death and were rarely spelled out in advance directives. These were striking findings considering that Mayo Clinic probably represents the best case scenario for patient preparedness. Two forces in population health make these findings relevant. One is that the number of patients with cardiac devices is increasing. The second is that the population of patients with these devices is growing older and more burdened with chronic diseases. There are many well documented complications with cardiac devices, but the one that I worry most about, particularly an ICD, is the creation of a ‘bad’ death. I refer to this as changing the mode of death from something sudden, painless and ...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs