Palliative Surgical Outcomes: Are We Looking Through a Keyhole?

Excerpt

The study by Badgwell et al. represents a necessary step in bringing the worlds of palliative surgical care and palliative medicine, both ably represented by the authors, closer together.1 Although they rightly conclude a larger sample size might give us more information about the best choice of tactics in the overall strategic goal of maintaining quality of life in the face of progressive physical decline, the high attrition rate from death in this study highlights more fundamental problems in the current conceptualization of the role of surgery and its outcome measurement in the palliative care setting. For a substantial number of the patients enrolled in this study the question may have been more about the quality of death than the quality of life. The question of “What would ‘success’ look like?” for those studied would have different answers depending on which of these two perspectives is taken. …