Atul reminds me of Mark Ruffalo in The Kids are All Right, appealing in an absent-minded cuddly type of way.
Cuddly, maybe, but his mind seems to be quite present.
So, aren't there advocates and ministers helping older people make end-of-life decisions?? Oh, and family members as well.
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.
