Today I attended my favorite seminar series with no real idea what the topic was. Granted the free food is what really drew me to the seminar in the first place but now I’ve become quite attached to the whole series so I attend religiously. This particular seminar (focused on cancer research and treatment) is attended about 40/60 by PhDs and MDs and it has a major clinical slant to it in most cases. Today the topic was palliative medicine. I am not afraid to admit that I had no idea what this was before the seminar so I started off by learning something new. Palliative medicine is basically the step before hospice. If you have a very poor prognosis with not long to live they bring in medical professionals to help you deal with dying. The whole premise behind this seminar was that it is a form of medicine that should be enacted at diagnosis. Currently you call in the palliative doctors when someone has about 6 months to live. I got the feeling that the point of bringing the speaker in was that there is a possibility of implementing such a program into the new cancer center here.
Anyway, I found the seminar actually quite interesting but what I found most intriguing was that in a room in which I have never seen a vacant seat, about half the room was empty. Upon looking around I realized that the only people attending were hungry graduate students, postdocs and a few hard core supporters of the new caner center director. Not a stethoscope in sight. The more the seminar went on, the more it became clear to me that the clinicians must not think much of this whole palliative care thing. As someone who has lost a loved one to a very unexpected and fast progressing disease, I was offended. The seminar speaker from MGH explained a wonderful system where a patient sits down with both the oncologist and the palliative care physician and discusses what is going to happen. They meet with both the patient and the families on a regular basis to make sure they are coping well and that they have the best quality of life possible. Now, this may sound like psycobabble crap to a bunch of clinicians who don’t have time to even attend a seminar on the subject, but I found it to be fascinating.
I understand that MDs are very busy and lead hectic lives but I’m pretty sure they saw this seminar pop up on their Blackberries and hit ‘ignore’ as soon as they saw the word palliative. If anything, it was a good indication of how the physicians here would react to such a program were to be implemented here. I’d like to tell these people who didn’t show up “shame on you” but I have no right to. For all I know there was a Big Important Emergency meeting that they were all attending.