Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect he meant it, too.
So then why do it in a hospital parking lot? Sounds more like a really excessive cry for help to me.
Perhaps he was thinking of the convenience of the morgue workers.
How Doctors Die
131–140 of 184 posts
Re: How Doctors Die
#132Tonight I will tell the mother of our child that if I reason in any way that resembles this article she should slap me in face and tell me to fight for my life. For my daughter and my own sake. In Sweden medical care is free. I can fight as long as I want without them getting in trouble. I also suspect I should fight so hard as if the illnes is truly terminal I will end sooner in flames, not later. I want all the tub…
Have you ever been hospitalized? How old are you?
Re: How Doctors Die
#133I was married to a doctor for 10 years. Before that, I lived with my aunt, also a doctor. The one thing that absolutely shocked me is how they thought about aging and death. I kept reminding them their goal should be to find cures for everything, no matter how hard it seems. I approach every engineering problem as solvable. Maybe I can't solve it right now with the tools I have. Maybe I can't figure out a way to solv…
How old are you? Have you ever been hospitalized? Undergone surgery? Had other invasive medical treatments?
Re: How Doctors Die
#134I was married to a doctor for 10 years. Before that, I lived with my aunt, also a doctor. The one thing that absolutely shocked me is how they thought about aging and death. I kept reminding them their goal should be to find cures for everything, no matter how hard it seems. I approach every engineering problem as solvable. Maybe I can't solve it right now with the tools I have. Maybe I can't figure out a way to solv…
their goal should be to find cures for everything
That's certainly a medical scientist's goal. It's not all the same as what I expect from a regular doctor, whose job it is to look after me - making a best effort to find or suggest cures where that is practical, or to minimize my suffering where it is not.
Re: How Doctors Die
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free or not, it seems to work pretty well for the citizens there. You don't have a sizable portion of the population filing bankruptcy over medical bills and they haven't gone bankrupt like Greece. Something Sweden is doing is right.
Greece has socialised healthcare, as do the rest of the European countries circling the drain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Greece It's worth noting that the US health model isn't a free-market system - the state links health care to employment, which distorts the market away from individual private health ownership, and creates patterns that make it easy for costs to creep up. The US health care model…
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Re: How Doctors Die
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free or not, it seems to work pretty well for the citizens there. You don't have a sizable portion of the population filing bankruptcy over medical bills and they haven't gone bankrupt like Greece. Something Sweden is doing is right.
Greece has socialised healthcare, as do the rest of the European countries circling the drain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Greece It's worth noting that the US health model isn't a free-market system - the state links health care to employment, which distorts the market away from individual private health ownership, and creates patterns that make it easy for costs to creep up. The US health care model…
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Re: How Doctors Die
#137I was in Best Buy earlier today and the sales guy who was trying to sell me a TV reminded me a lot of the doctors/residents I was dealing with during a few weeks I spent caring for a family member at Mass General Hospital a couple years ago. I don't think they do it consciously, but doctors try to sell you on their philosophies for healthcare. But it doesn't matter. You're sitting in a small room with dim lights and…
I don't think they do it consciously, but doctors try to sell you on their philosophies for healthcare. No, doctors try to make you as fully aware as possible of the options available to you, so that you or your heirs don't turn around and sue them later for 'withholding information that could have saved your life' or something along those lines. Arguably, these suits are motivated in part by the need to defray the e…
"Lawsuits" are an easy scapegoat, but it's probably not a significant driving factor. For example, Texas has very strict tort reform laws which basically make it impossible to sue a doctor for malpractice. But defensive medicine hasn't faded at all in the four years since those laws took effect.
Structurally, our system is designed to over-treat. With co-pays, insurance, subsidized care, and contractual discounts, patients seldom are aware of the exact cost of treatment. How often do Doctors explain to patients up front both the tests to be performed and the line-item cost (both to you and to the payor) of each?
Most doctors don't, and realistically can't, know the cost for each patient under each plan. Usually, it's a binary decision for the doctor (covered or not covered).
Try it sometime. When your physician suggests a procedure, ask what the real cost is, and whether he/she thinks that the value of the results will be worth the expenditure compared to alternatives. It's simply not something that's "baked in" to the thought process of the medical profession either in medical school, residency, or thereafter.
Re: How Doctors Die
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally on board with cryonics, it's really depressing that it gets swept under the rug considering it probably has at least 5% chance of working for a patient suspended today. Though your excuses for presently avoiding it seem pretty flimsy unless you're really dirt poor (I'd wager unlikely), especially when life insurance payable to the cryonics company is cheap (you only need $28-$35k for CI) and so are membership…
Setting aside how completely fictitious that 5% is, here are my problems: 1. Cryonics is the sci-fi version of Pascal's Wager. If cryonics is rational, than by the same reasoning so is Christianity. 2. Cryonics doesn't guarantee quality of life. If the brain is poorly preserved, you might be woken up in the far future with profound and irreparable dementia. And I mean "irreparable" not in relation to the limitations…
1. While Christianity hasn't changed, science & medical capability is increasing.
2. This concern is legitimate. There are going to be people that do not have good quality of life, or even a good brain, after being brought back from cryonics. It's a price.
3. You're arguing for the status Q, not because it's the best, but because it's all we've ever known. I think everyone who is cryonically frozen is ready to be shocked by the future. They understand moral relativity and how it varies with cultures, and they're ready to see what cool stuff our descendants will come up! After centuries of being frozen, I think that it will be legitimately interesting to meet someone from our age, and we may still be able to find a place in that world. I also think that we should be looking at what's best for the individual being frozen, not what's best for a hypothetical culture in the future. If I am reawakened in the far-flung future, I don't have any grand plans of reverting their culture.
4. I met a former employee of Alcor at a conference. She was also signed up with Alcor, and was currently working on cryonically freezing other tissues. She knew her shit, wasn't just locked into cultish thinking, and believed that there is a decent chance of some cryonically frozen people coming back.
Re: How Doctors Die
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greece has socialised healthcare, as do the rest of the European countries circling the drain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Greece It's worth noting that the US health model isn't a free-market system - the state links health care to employment, which distorts the market away from individual private health ownership, and creates patterns that make it easy for costs to creep up. The US health care model…
How is the state linking health care to employment? My understanding is that health care is linked to employment because of the adverse selection problem that occurs in a free market of individual health insurance. Can you elaborate on why you consider this to be the government's fault?
Health insurance is not taxed when a company pays for it, but individuals need to pay for it with after tax dollars.
Assume you can sign up for plan A at your company that costs 200$ a month and covers everything you want. Or you can buy Plan B which costs 180$ a month for the same coverage.
Assuming your marginal tax rate is over 10% then plan A costs you less money. Now, most company's bundle healthcare so it's harder to get that money out of the equation, but for small company's it easy to negotiate if you can get heath care cheaper though your spouse etc.
Re: How Doctors Die
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free or not, it seems to work pretty well for the citizens there. You don't have a sizable portion of the population filing bankruptcy over medical bills and they haven't gone bankrupt like Greece. Something Sweden is doing is right.
Greece has socialised healthcare, as do the rest of the European countries circling the drain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Greece It's worth noting that the US health model isn't a free-market system - the state links health care to employment, which distorts the market away from individual private health ownership, and creates patterns that make it easy for costs to creep up. The US health care model…
Nice job blaming socialized healthcare for the greek situation. Has there been a single serious or unserious comment blaming their problems on socialized healthcare? Glenn Beck wouldn't even do that.
Germany has socialized healthcare too, FWIW. Cheaper cost per capita than our system, with better results.