131–140 of 255 posts
The topic of a “living will” came up in a family discussion after my mother’s funeral. None of us have a pathological desire to live at all costs, but as it turns out, figuring out when to say “yeah I’m done, see yah” and halt treatment is way more complex than it first seems, especially when making the decision for someone else. Things can happen very fast, and there’s a bunch of things that basically require a job…
The Order of the Good Death has loads of resources on how to have these conversations, what your options for advanced directives etc. are, and guides on how to set everything up. https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/ They also do a lot of advocacy around green burial, alkaline hydrolysis, and whatnot as well. Caitlin Doughty (who founded the Order of the Good Death) Ask a Mortician channel on youtube covers this stuff…
I also discovered that my home state has ZERO listed green burial sites, which is shocking to me because... I live in VT. I would have guessed it would be the leader in green burial, it is right up our wheelhouse!
There must be some ultra-high-risk test pilot jobs available for 75 year olds with inoperable diseases. Go out with a bang!
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This really resonates with me. I’m 30 now. I had a rotator cuff injury last year and lost some range of motion in my shoulder for about 6 months. This year I got a personal trainer for the first time. I’m really trying to fight to get in shape and stay in shape. I spent my 20’s working and for the last 5 years I work remotely, largely ignoring my health. Sitting in a home office all day is really bad for you.
Use the next several years to build as much muscle as you can without damaging your joints. It gets extraordinarily difficult to add new muscle as you enter your mid-30s, but fortunately you still have time. I work out 3-4 days per week for ~90 minutes each. If you've never done strength training before, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn how much extra mass you can add, while remaining on a typical diet, with…
Only because it requires you to create a major new habit after 30 years on earth of not doing it, not because it's difficult physically. If you are putting in the time and especially the effort, it should be easy.
That said, the common mistake in the gym is when people just kinda do reps at some easy weight and then stop short with a bunch more reps left in reserve. Never really pushing themself. I guarantee that describes anyone finding it extraordinary difficult to build muscle.
Slightly tangential, but I believe this article segues into a discussion about assisted suicide or euthanasia at the end of life. My entire family has been suffering over the past 18 months watching my 88-year-old grandmother slowly pass away from age-related deterioration and AD. I worked with mice during my PhD training in the US. If a lab was caught with lab mice suffering like my grandmother is without euthanizin…
> Why can't there be assisted suicide/euthanasia protocols in place to prevent this suffering?
Even most religious people believe in mercy killing. The issue is the slippery slope, and the fact that various people have slid down this slope in every country with legal assisted suicide or euthanasia. Whenever you are going to have a third party, or even just a second party, involve itself in someone's death, you have to figure out how to deal with issues every bit as serious as letting someone suffer to death.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/10/05/californi...
I'd like dying to be as easy as flicking a switch. Medically-assisted suicide ought to be available to anyone (not only of sound mind and not only with a terminal condition), and at any time. People ought to have the right to die, just like they have the right to water, food, and shelter. In most countries it is currently easier to take other people's lives than to take one's own. People ought to be able to step into…
> I'd like dying to be as easy as flicking a switch. It is. Just flick the blade open on a switchblade and stab into your temple. You don't need a fricking second or third party to help you with this. Some of us atheists view life as more precious than many religious people do because this is it.
> fricking
Do you really have to be so violent in response?
There exist supervised injection sites for narcotics. You bring the drugs, the healthcare workers give you clean syringes/needles/paraphernalia and help you with the injection. As a society we have decided that it is OK for people to potentially wreck their own lives with narcotics.
Why not a similar concept for dying, where the end is only eternal oblivion? Step into a room, step inside a pod, press a button, pod closes, press another button to replace the air with nitrogen, done.
> life as more precious
I'm sorry, but 'life is precious' is a religious view, even if you call yourself 'atheist'. Life is just life, it is an emergent property of chemical and physical processes and laws. It is interesting, to be sure, but precious? Sorry, no. Humans have killed each other since they evolved from Australopithecus, and have only found more efficient, violent, and deadly ways to do so in the intervening five million years.
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It's probably ironic that it's never been easier to buy that drug (and others) and decide your own fate compared with trying for a dignified and hopefully pain-free death the "legal" way.
Doubly so given the epidemic of fentanyl contamination.
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The problem with this perspective in my opinion is that many times, especially for an elderly person, a small emergency can very quickly escalate into a life and death situation, and the outcome is not clear until it’s too late. you may enter the hospital thinking you have a decent outcome, but you end up with a bad outcome. for example, nobody plans to go on a ventilator. But if you need one (like severe pneumonia),…
https://www.sciencealert.com/study-more-patients-could-survi... > Yet families are often asked to make the call within 72 hours of someone sustaining a severe brain injury. Unless patients make a rapid recovery in the first few days, it's thought they are unlikely to survive or recover much at all. > The data Sanders and colleagues analyzed tentatively suggest otherwise. > The data revealed that 31 of the 56 brain tr…
"some" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. Recovering enough to have "at least some" independence after several months is not a great outcome. That very likely means lifelong daily care is required.
I'd like to see a survey about opinions on keeping people alive using modern medicine. The survey would have a filter for people who believe in evolution and survival of the fittest. How is the cognitive dissonance around it resolved?
"The fittest" isn't "the strongest" or "the mostest toughest" it is "the best at procreation in the environment in which they live". Assuming that people being kept alive by modern medicine are better at procreation, they are indeed the fittest. Of course most of the people being kept alive by modern medicine are old as hell, though, so they are hardly the childbearing or rearing type. So now I'm confused as to why y…
Just means that the survey would ask that question. I'm guessing that GP wants to check whether those who believe in the Darwin awards as well as the moral justness of evolutionary pressure killing certain people earlier that other people, would be more opposed to using modern medicine to keep people alive.
Maybe? It really depends because modern medicine is part of social Darwinism, even though it is against evolutionary biological survival of the fittest. So I could see this going multiple ways among this subset of people. I'd expect the richest of them to believe both in medical extension of life (and fertility treatments) as well as believing that only those who can personally, or societally, afford such intervention should get it. This may be the dissonance GP is mentioning.
I'd like to see a survey about opinions on keeping people alive using modern medicine. The survey would have a filter for people who believe in evolution and survival of the fittest. How is the cognitive dissonance around it resolved?
Tell me more about the dissonance you see. “Survival of the fittest” just means that in a challenging environment, those who can adapt will survive to go on and have children. If you are saying that modern medicine keeps some people alive through to parenthood who would otherwise have perished: yes, that’s true. We have made our environment less challenging.