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Modern medicine excels in ways to save a beating heart.
Yet hardly anything is known about how to humanely stop one.
Frustrated by the dearth of information about how to aid dying, Berkeley’s Dr. Lonny Shavelson is gathering data to guide other physicians through this new, important and sorrowful clinical frontier. Legalized in 2015, California’s End of Life Option Act allows doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients.
“We’re doing a medical procedure. And whatever is done in medicine should be done well, and consistently,” said Shavelson, 68, a UC San Francisco-educated former Emergency Room physician.
“Now we can tell patients: ‘We’re giving you the best protocol we have,’ ” said Shavelson, whose Bay Area End of Life Options medical practice has overseen 232 deaths. “And we’re getting better and better.”
When Californians passed the medical aid-in-dying law – inspired by Oakland’s Brittany Maynard, San Mateo’s Jennifer Glass and others who sought to end their suffering from cancer – voters assumed it promised them a neat Shakespearean-styled ending, like Romeo’s quick poisoning in Verona. That was the goal, but it didn’t always happen.
A little-known secret, not publicized by advocates of aid-in-dying, was that while most deaths were speedy, others were very slow. Some patients lingered for six or nine hours; a few, more than three days. No one knew why, or what needed to change.
“The public thinks that you take a pill and you’re done,” said Dr. Gary Pasternak, chief medical officer of Mission Hospice in San Mateo. “But it’s more complicated than that.”
So Shavelson, in collaboration with Washington-based retired anesthesiologist Dr. Carol Parrot, set out to compile data to help doctors help their patients. At a UC Berkeley-based conference last February, they co-founded the American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying. The Academy’s 240 clinicians are now contributing and sharing their own experiences.
BERKELEY, CA – FEBRUARY 18: Dr. Lonny Shavelson, of Bay Area End of Life Options, looks over data at his home office in Berkeley, Calif., on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020. Shavelson is leading a data collection project to learn what medications will most gently and quickly kill a person who chooses to die under the 2016 End of Life Options Act. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
To each deathbed, seated with grieving family members, Shavelson brings a clipboard with drug names and dosage levels.
As minutes tick by, he measures falling oxygen levels, slowing cardiac rhythms and fading respiration. He tracks outcomes while providing care.
The pharmacologic findings, shared with clinicians nationwide, are dramatically reducing the incidence of long, lingering and wrenching deaths.
“It’s really helpful to have someone actually studying the utility of what it is we’re doing,” said Pasternak. “So much of what we’re doing has arisen empirically. He’s collected such great data.”
“Patients want a medication that is effective. They want a swift, peaceful death,” he said.
Using the initial drug regimen in place when the law was passed, 34% of all patients took longer than two hours …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Health
