By James A. White in Wall Street Journal Health Blog
One thing health-care practitioners know about treating the elderly is that they don’t know enough about treating the elderly.The point is underscored today by Richard C. Frank, a doctor who writes in a WSJ.com guest column about a 83-year-old patient with heart problems seeking aggressive treatment to fight non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The cancer is often curable but there is precious little information about how much an elderly patient with a weak heart — or other serious conditions, for that matter — can handle the normal rigors of anti-cancer treatment.
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