A recent column by Dr. Pauline Chen at the New York Times explores a surprising oversight in modern healthcare: Doctors don't really have a clue how to predict how long a patient will live. In the absence of a widely accepted, systematic method of prognosis, they're kind of making it up---an informed guess, with the benefit of education and experience, but a guess nonetheless. Prognosis was once a diligently studied, widely practiced part of a physician's job, Chen writes. But as treatments improved, and keeping patients alive longer became ever more possible, the unpleasant but necessary skill of predicting when patients might die fell by the wayside. A recent study, she reports, revealed just how much:
Prognosis was rarely, if ever, alluded to in the most popular medical textbooks and on clinical Web sites used by practicing physicians. Even the widely used medical database PubMed, maintained by the National Library ...
