Slow medicine and the guilt of not doing enough for our loved ones...

My Mother, Your Mother Embracing "Slow Medicine," the Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Loved Ones is a book written by Dennis McCullough, M.D.

The book describes using the author's own experience how in the edge of ultra high tech medical technology, the promise of blockbuster drugs where both medical professionals and patients are conditioned to "fast medicine", ie quick diagnosis, early interventions and high doses of drugs should SLOW DOWN - particularly for the elderly.

According to Dr McCullough, "This medicine is specifically not intended to save lives or to restore youthful vigor, but to ease the inevitable irreversible decline of the very old."

In a sense, slow medicine can be quite commonsense in general. For example, if we have a headache, we can opt for a few options with varying degree of success and "fastness" and cost:

Option A: We can take a nap and sleep the headache off. Most often this will be enough and it is FREE.

Option B: We can decide to take paracetamol or aspirin. This will likely work most of the time and will cost less than $0.20.

Option C: We can panic and decide that our headache could be due to brain tumour, rush out to the hospital and ask for a CT of the brain. Usually, the CT will show all is normal and we end up going home to sleep off our headache but $700 poorer.

In a sense Option A is "slow medicine" but just as good.

Sometimes, slow medicine will take on an emotional paradigm, particularly when our loved ones are involved. The question we may carry when asked to consider slow medicine is "are we doing enough for our loved ones?"

My friend's elderly mom had brain tumour. Several doctors did not offer a good prognosis and the advice was to keep her "comfortable" - Slow Medicine. His love and gratitude for his mom could not be reconciled with slow medicine. For him, he needed to know that he has done all that is medically possible and no cost will be spared. Subsequently, major head and neck surgery was performed that was deemed "medically successful" but left his mom immobile, unable to speak and depressed. Maybe this would have been the natural outcome of the disease in any case, but maybe keeping her "comfortable" and spending her last days of her lives fully functional could have been better. But, who are we to judge? The emotional roller-coaster of such decisions are perfectly understandable.

Dr McCullough suggest that we should start slow medicine early. Start showing up for our parents' medical appointment, start questions around should they continue to drive, start watching for their bad health habits and advocate a better lifestyle, resist highly interventional procedures even when recommended by doctors...

This is a good reminder for me. I love my parents dearly and the time is now...