Palliative Care: Connecting The Dots Between Home Care and Hospice

Mike Magee In recent years I have frequently written about and discussed the need for a “parallel build-out” in order to achieve truly preventative care in the United States.(1) This refers to the challenge on the one hand of better managing our current burden of chronic disease in mostly older Americans, while at the same […]

Pete Hamill, Dr. Delaney, and The Promise of Palliative Care.

Mike Magee Last week, as part of research on a long-term project, I read Pete Hammil’s terrific novel North River. It recounts the experience of a fictional doctor, James Delaney, in New York City in the 1930’s.(1) In one passage, Hamill describes Dr. Delaney this way: “He was a doctor, but medicine was not an […]

Bill Novelli, C-TAC, and A Fresh Look At Palliative Care

Bill Novelli, professor in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, and former CEO of AARP, recently reflected on an article by Atul Gawande, M.D. in the New Yorker (1) on our system of care for Americans with advanced disease. Novelli agreed with Gawande that our system has “utterly failed” on a number of […]

Slaying The “Death Panel” Bull: Taking Control of Your End-of-Life Decisions

Mike Magee This Saturday, April 16, 2011 is National Healthcare Decisions Day – a day set aside to encourage families throughout America to discuss with each other how much care and what kind of care they would like as they approach the end of their lives.(1) Why advanced planning? Because there is a good chance […]

The Bob Butler Tribute: 2 Week Seminar on Aging – Day 14

The Bob Butler Tribute Seminar: Final Day Day 1. Aging Demographics Day 2. The Challenge of Longevity Day 3. Measuring Aging Vitality and Independence Day 4. When Caregivers Need Care Day 5. Long Distance Caregivers Day 6. The Economics of Living Longer Day 7. Financing Home Health Care Day 8. Elder Abuse and Vulnerable Elders […]

Hospice: Effective and Underutilized

A service that can vastly improve the quality of your final days In a society that puts a heavy emphasis on curative health care — and tends to avoid dealing with death altogether — it’s not surprising that most people have little familiarity with hospice care. This is unfortunate, as hospice can make all the […]