TY - JOUR T1 - Honour your father and mother: ageism in medicine JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 347 LP - 348 VL - 57 IS - 538 AU - Ann Bowling Y1 - 2007/05/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/57/538/347.abstract N2 - Ageism, a negative bias or prejudice based on age, has long been prevalent in Western societies where older people are commonly perceived as having low value, and placing a high economic burden on society. Age has been used as a criterion for rationing scarce healthcare resources (for example, kidney transplantation), and has been justified on the basis of the greater good versus the individual: that older people have a shorter duration of benefit from treatment and they have had a ‘fair innings’.1 If resources are scarce, it is assumed that they should be assigned to younger people.Preferential treatment for younger people may have made sense in 1948, when 40% of people died before they reached 65 years of age, compared with the current 7%. It is less defensible now, given the improvement in longevity, the effectiveness of medical interventions for older people which is apparent in clinical practice, and the compression of morbidity into the last years, or even months, of long and active lives.2 The National Service Framework for Older People3 aimed to ensure that older people are not discriminated against because of their age when in need of health or social care. However, there is a consistent body of evidence in Europe and the US that older people are less likely than younger people to receive a range of indicated treatments. Heart disease provides some rich examples of how discrimination by age might operate, from … ER -