I’m no politician or lawyer nor medical consultant – just a guy with incurable (terminal?) prostate cancer.
Professor Roger Kirby made the point this morning about the uncertainty of how long a man with incurable prostate cancer will take to die.
A team of consultants were asked to report on the health of Megrahi!! before his release, its worth reading their accounts and I say no more on that subject.
BUT it does raise another issue, its the one around “whats the difference between incurable and terminally ill?”
There is actually a definition which says ” a terminally ill patient is one that their life expectancy is estimated to be six months or less” BUT a patient with a slowly progressing disease (and prostate cancer is considered to be one of those) would not necessasarily be descibed as terminally ill because best estimates would be over 6 months. Generally health care professionals would over estimate terminally ill patients who they say estimate to live for 6 weeks but would likely die in four weeks.
A similar definition is also used by the benefits payments office in assessing a person for the non means tested benefit called Disability Living Allowance (DLA) available to ALL terminally ill people who by their definition are “ a patient who is not reasonably expected to live for more than six months”
Which of course begs the question HOW to assess a patient, WHO assess a patient and WHEN is a patient assessed.
Keith
