A few weeks ago, my son-in-law who's a fellow in internal medicine on the west coast sent me this
link to an essay by Ken Murray, a retired physician from USC about how doctors choose to control their own deaths. It's a really fascinating and thought-provoking read. Patients don't die the way their doctors often do, but they should!
The first four paragraphs are reprinted here to get your attention:
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Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds, from 5 percent to 15 percent, albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. 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.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen; that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call "futile care" being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, "Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me." They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped "NO CODE" to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
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There is much more to this excellent article including a review of how patients, doctors and the system often conspire to bring about such futile, expensive, and often painful end of life care. Even the best intentioned patients can get trapped by the system. Family members often have unrealistic expectations and contribute to the problem. When they say "do everything possible" do they really mean, "do everything possible that's reasonable"?
There's also an excellent discussion of this essay and topic on
Time.Com.
I'm told that Dr. Murray's article has "gone viral" on the internet so you may have already seen it, but if you haven't you need to. Share it with your family and friends as well. Bravo to Dr. Murray.