END OF LIFE DECISIONS - Why Don't We Die Well

COMMENT:  This is something I totally agree with.  For me, it is more important that I enjoy the rest of my life (I'm 69) that if I live past 70.  I do have family genetics on my side, all my relatives, on both sides, live into their early 80s.

"We all die, so why don’t we die well?" PBS NewsHour 10/9/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Finally tonight: deciding what’s important, and preparing for the inevitable, a conversation about the end of life.

Jeffrey Brown has that.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  “I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them,” words written by a surgeon, but if you take out the reference to medical school, probably true of most of us.  We might learn to live. Few of us learn to die.

That is the subject of a new book titled “Being Mortal.”  And the aforementioned surgeon is also the author, Atul Gawande.

And welcome to you.

DR. ATUL GAWANDE, Author, “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End:  Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN:  There are two facts of life you seem to focus on.  One is that, yes, we all age and die, and the other is that we don’t seem to understand it very well.

DR. ATUL GAWANDE:  No.

Medicine has taken over mortality in some sense.  We are responsible more and more for trying to fix the problems of aging and dying.  But we don’t know how to do it.  And I think the thing that I discovered was, we have a fundamental failure.  We don’t recognize that people have priorities besides just living longer.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Why do we not understand that, I mean, that we want to live longer, but we want to live longer in a certain way with certain values and beliefs?

DR. ATUL GAWANDE:  Yes, I think you’re exactly right.

Some people will say it’s really important to me that my brain work, that I am who I am.  Other people will say, look, I just want to know that I’m not suffering and that I’m not in pain.  Others will say, I have a life project that’s really important to me.

And the fact that we in medicine, we prioritize health, safety, and survival.  We think that that must be what people place first.  But, in fact, we make choices all the time in our own homes about risks we take.

And one of the consequences is that, in medicine, as we face problems we can’t fix, like aging or a terminal illness, we often sacrifice the very reasons that people want to be alive.