How is time to death calculated in terminally I’ll patients?
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If you’re talking about the prognosis when someone has cancer and the doctor “gives them six months”, that’s a calculation called the median survival tjme. It’s based on how long other patients with this cancer have survived past diagnosis.
If the median survival time is six months for a particular kind of cancer, that means that half the patients survived more than six months after they were diagnosed, and the other half died before six months.
There’s a great essay by Stephen Jay Gould called “[The Median Isn’t the Message](https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/median-isnt-message/2013-01)”, about how he could have been terrified by his cancer diagnosis with its short median survival time except that he knew how to interpret statistics and understood that some of those patients lived *far* beyond the eight months that was quoted. He did ultimately survive a couple of decades beyond his diagnosis, if I remember correctly.
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