Meaning
The meaning and usefulness of the QALY is debated. Perfect health is hard, if not impossible, to define. Some argue that there are health states worse than being dead, and that therefore there should be negative values possible on the health spectrum (indeed, some health economists have incorporated negative values into calculations). Determining the level of health depends on measures that some argue place disproportionate importance on physical pain or disability over mental health. The effects of a patient's health on the quality of life of others (e.g. caregivers or family) do not figure into these calculations.
Read more about this topic: Quality-adjusted Life Year
Famous quotes containing the word meaning:
“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)