Quality of Life

Although various quality of life studies, surveys, and instruments shed light on what enhances or diminishes quality of life, or our perceptions and experience of it, they confuse defining the concept of quality of life, understanding a general principle for it, and being able to individualize the criteria for different people. More important, quality of life is not the precise concept that is important and relevant in the issues that are of medical importance; there is a better, more precise concept to use— the concept of whether a treatment or life with particular circumstances is worthwhile. Quality of life is not commonly important in the practice of medicine outside of psychiatry; it is considered to be important, outside of psychiatry, mostly or only in regard to end-of-life care, radical treatment procedures, and rehabilitative medicine in the case of traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury, particularly when the latter two cause especially serious and devastating disability. In those cases, consideration of quality of life, as it is described in the literature, is a mistake for a number of reasons.