January 14, 2003
Physician to speak on end-of-life care
By GINNY MERRIAM of the Missoulian
Missoula physician and end-of-life researcher and advocate Ira Byock will speak on Tuesday in Missoula about "The Best Care Possible: What it Means at the End of Life and How to Get It."
Byock's talk is part of a week of events focusing on the Choices Bank, Missoula's electronic depository of living wills, powers of attorney for health care and other advance directives.
The definition of "the best care possible" is complex in today's health care system. Is the best care the care that comes with sophisticated life-saving and life-prolonging technology? Or is it the care that comforts without intervening? Or something in between?
Byock will discuss how individuals can determine the kind of care they get with effective use of advance directives and other methods. He will talk at 5 p.m. in the Day Room at Community Medical Center's Rehabilitation Center.
Byock was a founder of the Life's End Institute (Missoula Demonstration Project) and is its principal investigator. He is director of The Palliative Care Service in Missoula, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation national grant program Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care, faculty member at the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana and research professor in UM's philosophy department, a board member of the National Health Council in Washington, D.C., and frequent speaker around the country.
Admission to the lecture is free. It's sponsored by the Minerva Society of the Community Medical Center Foundation and the Life's End Institute.
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