How is time to death calculated in terminally I’ll patients?
In: 510
We don’t give people “x months to live”. It generally ends up being inaccurate and creates a lot of confusion and stress.
I can tell you when you or your family will die in minutes or hours and am reasonably accurate for a few days. All of that is really just an eyeball guess based on objective data and the natural course of whatever disease the patient has.
For longer term diseases, there are various mortality calculators and data to guess when someone will die, but it’s not really a guess. All we know is that “‘x’% of people die in ‘y’ years”. We often don’t know how well or poorly someone will do because the data is not that individualized.
Sadly, we are typically terrible at prognostication for time horizons any longer than what I mentioned above. People die earlier and later than we think.
Source: I’m an IM doctor.
Edit: a few sentences changed for clarity
Latest Answers