The primary motivation these days for tube feeding is provider convenience......
Dr. Mitchell has had a lot to do with that shift. As a young physician training in nursing homes, she wondered whether feeding tubes actually helped these bedbound elders. At the time, roughly a third of cognitively impaired nursing home residents were tube-fed.
She and a cadre of researchers, primarily from Harvard and Brown universities, have been methodically reporting their findings for 20 years, demonstrating in one article after another the drawbacks of artificial feeding for people in the final stages of dementia.
Change can come slowly in medicine, but it does come. In 2013, the American Geriatrics Society updated its recommendations against feeding tubes for older patients with advanced dementia. The Choosing Wisely campaign, which publishes lists of procedures and tests that patients and families should question, and the Alzheimer’s Association have takensimilar positions.
Now, families and physicians seem to have gotten the sorrowful message: Dementia is a terminal disease. Eating and swallowing problems eventually plague almost everyone who has it. Feeding tubes don’t help. In fact, they can make matters worse.