JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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To evaluate how well quality of life is being measured in the medical literature and to offer a new approach to the measurement. ⋯ Because quality of life is a uniquely personal perception, denoting the way that individual patients feel about their health status and/or nonmedical aspects of their lives, most measurements of quality of life in the medical literature seem to aim at the wrong target. Quality of life can be suitably measured only by determining the opinions of patients and by supplementing (or replacing) the instruments developed by "experts."