Most people don’t think of doctors – or healthcare workers for that matter – as particularly vulnerable to death; and with good reason. After all, they are who we go to when we’re sick, disabled, or dying. This, however, is not the case. Doctors are human, too and will face death, just like everyone.
In 2011, Dr. Ken Murray wrote How Doctors Die. It was a powerful (and viral) essay that explained the way physicians viewed end-of-life care. He wrote: “Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits.”
It is these limits that he uses to describe what medical professionals call “futile care” which is somewhat of a last-ditch attempt to prolong life. Here, doctors take whatever latest development technology has to offer and unleashes it on the patient. He describes:
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By this time, the patients will have undergone extreme and undignified situations, and their families will have spent thousands of dollars. This isn’t anyone’s fault in particular, he writes, “in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment.”
Doctors, he writes, often opt out of this system.
Murray volunteers “Charlie,” a renowned orthopedist and his personal mentor, as an example. Charlie, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, was given a chance to undergo a procedure that would further his life.
Charlie refused the option and instead went home, closed his practice, and spent the rest of his time with family and friends. No chemotherapies, no medications, not even a minor surgery. He died months later, in relative peace.
Five years later, however, in a study published by the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, data around 200,000 Medicare beneficiaries were investigated. They found no significant difference between the number of physicians and non-physicians hospitalized in the last six months of their
Misdiagnosis is a huge problem that accounts for a large number of deaths in the United States and around the world. Some of the causes of this could be from the amount of time doctors have with their patients and bias the doctors can have. Susannah was an exception in being able to pay for the treatment she received. The average American would have likely not been able to afford this type of care. This highlights the major medical divide that is present in the country.
Recent profit driven health care systems are influencing doctors to lessen care in order to cut expenses. If a doctor prescribes a lethal medication to a patient it is cheaper rather than having the patient take medication for long term conditions and serious illness
Kevin t. Keith addresses his argument on why doctors should should stop futile treatment in a persistent tone.which is addressed to the healthcare network and the families of terminally ill patients. He presented a fair argument with questionable facts, ok anecdotes, and substandard
What is a doctor’s point of view? Doctor Michelle Stanford, was served as the chief resident at Children’s Hospital in Denver among many other accolades. Dr. Stanford, states it undermines the integrity of the medical profession; she goes on to quote the American Medical Association “Allowing physicians to participate would cause more harm than good, physicians assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s as healer would difficult or impossible and would pose serial societal risks.” (Prop 106 - Dr. Michelle Stanford).
Terminally ill patients lose control over so many aspects of their lives, in many ways physician-assisted death gives them back some of the control they lost. Illness is not discriminatory. Therefore, people of all ages and backgrounds are diagnosed with things like cancer, kidney failure, and heart disease every day. Also, for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with any terminal illness, it can feel like their disease controls every aspect of their lives and they have no choice in the matter. Authors for the Journal of the American Society on Aging Lee Combs and Grube describe how persistent pain took control of a young woman named Brittany Maynard’s life, “Even after undergoing a sophisticated surgery and numerous cancer treatments,
Gill argues that keeping a person healthy cannot be a physician’s only moral duty because in cases of terminal ill patients, they can no longer be treated or healed (372). If a physician’s only duty were to heal patients then they would not tend to the terminally ill because there would be nothing else that they could do, which is something that most people would find to be morally wrong (Gill, 373). No one would be okay with a doctor not helping a person at all who has received a terminal sentence. So instead of promoting health in this case, the physicians must find a way to reduce the suffering of the patient. This means that the physician should be able to reduce the suffering in the way that the patient asks for.
Atul Gawande’s book, “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” explores different themes such as, aging, death, and the mishandling of both aging and death by the medical profession’s. This book also addresses what it means to live well near the end of life. It is not just to survive, not just to be safe, not just to stay alive as long as the medical technology allows, but, according to the author it is about what living truly means to an individual. The author describes that the idea of “Being Mortal” developed as he watched his elderly father go through a steep decline in his health and the eventual death. He soon realized that during his medical education and training he was never taught how to help his patients with managing
Lastly, those who commit physician assisted suicide can save the lives of others. Pre-informed deaths help hospitals save the vital organs of the person willing to die and prepare for a successful transplant. Death is unpredictable, but many organs are
There sometimes is a point that a human reaches in degeneration that modern medicines cannot aide or remedy. As described by Lewis Cohen, “Medication such as morphine can help the terminally ill manage pain, but it can’t ameliorate their agony at no longer being the same people that they were before the illness” (Cohen). The unbearable pain and loss of normalcy that accompanies those with terminal illnesses is what pushes them to consider assisted suicide. The mentality is seen simply as “if one is going to die anyway, then why not choose how and when.” Unfortunately, the choice of death for those with incurable circumstances has been twisted into other views and is being misinterpreted as a way for doctors to mercy kill their patients.
Pamela Wible’s article What I’ve Learned from my Tally of 757 Doctor Suicides and Pranay Sinha’s Why Do Doctors Commit Suicide, provides two reasons for the plague of doctor suicide. These three sources have a common backing: stress. Stress comes a variety of fashions, but two common ones are: stress comes either from the patients, or stress comes from
They think that having a discussion about this sensitive topic can help build trust between patients with their doctors, nurses, and others around them. For example, Doctor Schwartz, who spoke at the Society of General Internal Medicine annual meeting in Toronto said, “because conflicts over futility can create mistrust between family members and the healthcare system, the most important thing a doctor can do is work to build trust remembering that this is the process that doesn’t always happen immediately.” (Gesensway) Schwartz claims that even though there can be mistrust between doctors and their patients, one of the most important things is making sure that the patient is comfortable and that they are only suggesting these treatments to help them. However, doctor Schwartz’s method does not work with everybody. A random national sample of 1117 people asked citizens how they feel about aid-in-dying and if they think that having discussions about this topic can affect the trust of patients with their doctors.
Summary - Response Essay Why study and train really hard to be a doctor, when in reality you’ll actually be killing patients? According to the article “Should Doctors be allowed to Kill,” author Wente (2015) argues why be a doctor to save lives through years of education and training, if you will be the one assisting someone to commit suicide instead. The article focuses a lot on the negativity of the topic of doctors being allowed to kill, such as instigating death instead of protecting life would be morally wrong for many doctors and permitting assisted suicides could lead to serious abuse or misuse. I agree with the author (Wente, 2015) that doctors would be morally against initiating the death of their patients and I also agree that if assisted suicide was permitted then many people might abuse that choice.
It is very clear to most that Grey ’s Anatomy is an inaccurate depiction of medicine and the healthcare industry. Though heavily dramatized and ‘doctored’, there have been moments of learning, especially with this ethical issue.
One can infer that this is coverage cuts. The fact that the doctor is represented as death is stating that the patient will not receive his necessary treatment and will die because his insurance will not cover said treatment. The audience of this article appears to be the general American public who rely on insurance to cover medical expenses. The tone of this article is serious with an undertone of hopelessness.
Furthermore, some patients who are fully-conscious may say that they want to go to the ends of the earth to find treatment. They may be very clear that they do not want to die and will do anything to survive. The depressing part of this situation comes when the patient receives news that they are at the end of their treatment and that no other options that could benefit them exist. Basically, that patient must make the decision if they want to die peacefully without treatment or be hooked onto life-support for the remainder of what little time is left in their life. The sad truth is, sometimes patients can fight to the bitter end, but still end up losing.