Facing End-of-Life with Dignity
Written by Ann Pietrangelo on April 7th, 2009 in Doctors, Emotional Issues, Family, Health Care Policy, Linked Articles.
Death.
It’s a perfectly natural part of life, but somewhere along the way we’ve developed an unhealthy and sometimes cruel aversion to it. Not discussing imminent death only prolongs suffering for the patient and the family, while leaving many personal emotional issues unresolved.
According to a New York Times blog by Maggie Jones, even doctors struggle to talk about dying with their patients, and often fail to bring up the subject at all. As a consequence, patients suffer needless and often painful interventions at the end of their lives that can add thousands of dollars to a single patient’s medical costs with with no benefit.
We’ve got doctors who are uncomfortable with the subject, patients who don’t want to burden loved ones, family members who don’t want to upset the patient, and a group avoidance of the inescapable reality of death, a perfectly normal and natural event…
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