Abstract
“Treatment with this drug leads to 6-month survival rate 50% and a 12-month survival rate of 20%. Just best supportive care is associated with a 6-month survival rate of about 30%. The cost of this drug is patients’-family’s-annual-income per month.”
As I stood on one side of a quaint, run-down outpatient clinic room, entirely insignificant to the emotionally burdensome conversation taking place before me, I heard a caring, enduring Oncologist explain these words to a patient and their family. The patient was suffering from a kind of cancer and was at a stage beyond cure. This encounter was taking place in an enormously large-volume tertiary care cancer centre catering in big part to the less financially-able, a brief but powerful moment of empathy and objective directness amidst the relentlessly rapid bustle of clinical encounters that could never be quick enough to meet the demands of an overflowing waitlist.
Recommended Citation
Parekh, Deevyashali
(2024)
"How to measure the cost-efficiency of time?,"
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 9:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol9/iss1/2