{"id":7812,"date":"2015-09-27T08:32:53","date_gmt":"2015-09-27T08:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/?p=7812"},"modified":"2015-12-03T07:22:26","modified_gmt":"2015-12-03T07:22:26","slug":"2015-09-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/2015-09-27\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternatives to the Medical Model for Treating the Elderly"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><strong>Richard O. Duda<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>September 27, 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Few doctors are choosing to be trained for geriatric care. As a result, the elderly are often treated using the so-called medical model: determine the most life-threatening problem and treat it. The medical model prioritizes maintaining life at all costs. But it is failing elderly patients with serious illnesses. 25% of Medicare spending is for 5% of patients in their final year of life, and most of the expensive treatments provide little real benefit (see http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/pages\/frontline\/being-mortal\/). However, there are alternatives that focus on making the remaining days as good as possible. Richard O. Duda will discuss these issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard O. Duda September 27, 2015 Few doctors are choosing to be trained for geriatric care. As a result, the elderly are often treated using the so-called medical model: determine the most life-threatening problem and treat it. The medical model prioritizes maintaining life at all costs. But it is failing elderly patients with serious illnesses. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/2015-09-27\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Alternatives to the Medical Model for Treating the Elderly&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[243,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7813,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812\/revisions\/7813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humanists.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}