The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on August 06, 2010, 02:38:52 pm ---Atul reminds me of Mark Ruffalo in The Kids are All Right, appealing in an absent-minded cuddly type of way.
--- End quote ---
Cuddly, maybe, but his mind seems to be quite present. ;D
--- Quote ---So, aren't there advocates and ministers helping older people make end-of-life decisions?? Oh, and family members as well.
--- End quote ---
Ministers and family members don't fully understand potential medical consequences, and doctors are loathe to candidly discuss the near-inevitability of a patient's imminent death. Advocates in the form of hospice workers can bridge the divide, but in most cases the patients must accept that their impending death and give up extensive life-saving procedures in order to use hospice care.
The overall point is that people wind up undergoing excessive and expensive procedures trying to extend their lives, even though the time they buy is often minimal at best and in the meantime they may suffer much more than they would otherwise. The trouble is that on rare occasions those procedures DO come through and offer patients extra years of life. Often, though, it's more like weeks or months, and very unpleasant ones at that. According to Atul, people tend not to get realistic appraisals of this.
Jeff Wrangler:
Over lunch today I just read Patricia Marx on cars in the Aug. 16 & 23 issue. Very funny at the end! I love it when she describes hybrid vehicles as the motorized equivalent of free-range chickens. ;D
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on August 24, 2010, 12:45:29 pm ---Over lunch today I just read Patricia Marx on cars in the Aug. 16 & 23 issue. Very funny at the end! I love it when she describes hybrid vehicles as the motorized equivalent of free-range chickens. ;D
--- End quote ---
I always enjoy her articles. If you have to cover shopping, that's the way to do it.
What makes the New Yorker so great is that it publishes so many writers whose work is almost always worth reading no matter what it's about, which besides Marx include Anthony Lane, David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Ariel Levy, Atul Gawande, Larissa MacFarquhar ...
Front-Ranger:
That's true!! On the advice of friend Jeff, I've been reading the article about end-of-life care, and I'm about halfway through it. It's a slog, with too much about what things cost and not enuff about ennithing else.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on August 24, 2010, 10:29:52 pm ---That's true!! On the advice of friend Jeff, I've been reading the article about end-of-life care, and I'm about halfway through it. It's a slog, with too much about what things cost and not enuff about ennithing else.
--- End quote ---
Well, one of the things that I took away from the article was that that was one of the author's points: Often lots of money gets spent on expensive treatments that ultimately do no good and may even make the patient suffer more in the time that he or she has left.
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