We've bringing you something a bit peripheral to our normal topics today, but it deals with the business of medicine. Plus, it is excellent.
How Doctors Die by Ken Murray, MD talks about how doctors face end of life issues. Many might assume that when faced with a terminal condition, physicians would leverage their expertise and access to the max, harnessing all the latest treatments and technologies. But the picture that Murry paints is a very different one. Armed with the knowledge of just how grueling and terrible the "do everything possible" model can be, many doctors choose to forgo chemo, radiation, surgery, and other life-prolonging treatments entirely.
"What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently."
Some physicians who have participated in or witnessed extraordinary and extreme measures to prolong life - what Murray calls "futile care" - wear "No Code" medallions or tattoos.
Why, if they don't want this treatment themselves, do they inflict it on patients? Murray explores the many often human reasons why family members and physicians make these choices and points to a system that encourages and rewards excessive treatment and unrealistic expectations about what medicine can do. Plus, as a society, we have a cultural bias against accepting death. Perhaps it was ever so - no one want to die. But advertising, a stay-young-forever culture, pharmacology, and the miracles of technology all conspire to make us think we perhaps can live forever. When someone facing a terminal illness chooses acceptance of the natural order, they are often pressured by family and friends for not being a fighter.
The comments in the article are also well worth reading. Other people -- doctors, medical professionals, and "civilians"-- offer their thoughts, opinions, and touching real life experiences with family members, friends, and even their own terminal circumstances.
