French general practitioners vary in their attitudes toward treating terminally ill patients
Résumé
The purpose of this study is to analyze French general practitioners' attitudes towards prescribing oopiace pinkillers for dying patient and compare them with their attitudes toward making frequent home visits. One hundre and fifteen general practitioners indicated the acceptability of prescribing opiates in 48 scenarios of terminal cancer patients with different levels of age, gender, stated pain, request for painkillers, and sign of depression; 103 of them also indicated ther acceptability of marking frequent home visits in the same 48 scenarios. The responses were analyzd using analysis of variance and cluster analysis. For prescribing opiates, four clusters of physicians were found: 13 prescribed primarily in response to stated pain; 43 to requestfor painkillers; 43 to the combination of pain, request, and depression; and 13 in virtually all cases. Using the same clusters to analyze visitings gave results that were very consistent with those for prescribing. We conclude that French general practitioners have differing and consistent styles in prescribing painkillers and making home visits to dying cancer patients.