While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on April 27, 2011. By Liz Borkowski Last week, Andrew Sullivan noted that a large proportion of healthcare costs are for the last days and hours of patients’ lives and made the following proposal: If everyone aged 40 […]
She’s a hospice nurse. When I tell people her occupation, I typically receive a response like this: “She must be a very special person. I could never work in a place where people go to die.” Hospice is a “place,” and equating hospice to death, are just two of the misperceptions that hospice care providers […]
Last week, Andrew Sullivan noted that a large proportion of healthcare costs are for the last days and hours of patients’ lives and made the following proposal: If everyone aged 40 or over simply made sure we appointed someone to be our power-of-attorney and instructed that person not to prolong our lives by extraordinary measures […]
If you haven’t already, go read Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Letting Go.” As a surgeon, Gawande knows how doctors tend to death with terminally ill patients, both because of their training and their ordinary human tendencies. As a writer, he knows how to weave together personal stories and explanations into a seamless portrait of […]