Contributing Factors
There are multiple factors that are contributing to the orphan patient problem in North America. Some of them include:
- problems maintaining a supply of qualified health practitioners
- providing access to them where and when they are needed most
- a growing population of patients
- an aging population of patients
- a sicker population of patients (particularly with diabetes and obesity being rampant in North America)
- a more "medicalized" population of patients (expectations for medical care are higher than ever, and we have more defined diseases to treat)
- increasing complexity of treatments for the diseases we have always known about (standard-of-care treatment for heart attack is much more labour-intensive now than it was even a decade ago)
The orphan patient problem has only been recognized in the media recently.
Older medical references mention the term 'orphan patient' using a different definition, specifically patients with an orphan disease. For example, New England Journal of Medicine mentioned patients with orphan diseases as orphan patients in 1988:
N Engl J Med. 1988 Mar 10;318(10):646. The orphan patient. Shelley WB, Shelley ED. Publication Types: Letter PMID 3344016
Read more about this topic: Orphan Patient
Famous quotes containing the words contributing and/or factors:
“But then in what way are things called good? They do not seem to be like the things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one then by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or are they rather one by analogy? Certainly as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul, and so on in other cases.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers’ attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.”
—Michael Lewis (late–20th-century)