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How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

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Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#151

Post by GoodOldNe »

lostlogin wrote: post #62
clukic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. CPR initiated within 2 minutes of cardiac arrest increases survival rate by 81%. The fact that CPR is rarely initiated so quickly (and thus survival rates are extremely low), says nothing about the efficacy of CPR. In the best cases where CPR is initiated https://newsroom.heart.org/news/bystander-cpr-up-to-10-minut...

I struggle square those numbers with the ones below, showing 11% survival (22% making it to hospital alive). I can’t find a source for it, but I’m told that survival after an arrest in hospital is actually lower, due to the co-morbidities that patients have. https://www.resus.org.nz/assets/OHCA_All_NZ_Feb23.pdf

Cardiac arrest is an incredibly heterogenous condition. A witnessed VF arrest in a young person with an inherited electrical type heart condition who gets compressions and a shock on a gym basketball court can wake up and walk away normal. A 98 year old who codes from sepsis or a fentanyl OD who is profoundly hypoxic or acidemic who gets enough Narcan and CPR to start having a heartbeat again after 15 minutes is very different. The statistics reflect this but you can’t generalize from the general to the specific in this case.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#152

Post by ButlerianJihad »

fhdkweig wrote: post #134
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan And also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case But it is disingenuous to invoke "rightwing government", when a Franciscan friar was sneaking into the hospital trying to feed a starving woman [Terri], who was so hated by her husband that he would take extreme measures to get rid of her. I have found it quite elusive to get a DNR properly execut…

> But it is disingenuous to invoke "rightwing government", when a Franciscan friar was sneaking into the hospital trying to feed a starving woman [Terri], who was so hated by her husband that he would take extreme measures to get rid of her. I don't think he hated her, he just didn't want to be under the crushing medical debt to keep someone alive who wasn't really alive. And absolutely there was Rightwing government…

> someone alive who wasn't really alive.

Wow what a completely horrible and deliberate misunderstanding of the facts. I hope that if you're ever in a state where all it takes to keep you alive is food and water, that people continue giving food and water to you, rather than seeking to starve you to death.

Because someone who eats and drinks is alive, usually by definition, and what her husband sought was to kill her off, because her "aliveness" wasn't "useful" to anyone, and in fact was an inconvenience to him and other people.

Nobody, at the time or since, said that Schiavo "wasn't really alive" but rather, some people wanted her dead, and they wanted that boundary of "ordinary life-sustaining care" to be moved so that it didn't include food and water, administered into her stomach.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#153

Post by charintstr »

____tom____ wrote: post #25

On the spectrum or go gentle vs fight, I'd have to say, now is the time is history where "fight" makes the most sense. This is not abstract for me. I have not one, but two forms of cancer. Both were considered incurable when I was diagnosed. Both have treatments now that, IN SOME PEOPLE, lead to remission. I still don't know which group I am, but I'd be dead from either one by now, if I hadn't elected to treat. New t…

Are you a youngish person (<60 yrs) ? If so then this article probably isn't meant for you. This is more meant for the thousands of elderly that get subjected to needless procedures in ICU when their chances of survival are already low. I can recount them from experience of working with people who administered them. This is just the case of American medicine. And in many other countries doctors wouldn't feel pressured to do this.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#154

Post by robocat »

rlpb wrote: post #131
teiferer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing with your overall sentiment, but this caught my eye: > If I'm 80, I'm (somewhat) less concerned with length of life, and more concerned with quality. If I'm 50 that's a different equation Why is that? Is quality less important at 50? Would you be more willing to endure suffering if you are younger? Why? I'm thinking that no matter age, people would generally like to avoid a painful death. Maybe it's because…

What if you have young kids? It might be worth the suffering for their benefit.

Perhaps don't have kids in your 40s. It's pretty mean to have kids at 50 because of the high risk of sickness or death while they're teenagers (or younger). Plus the risks of genetic faults in children rises dramatically for dads or mums much over about 40. After 40 kids will often miss out on having grandparents.

Our society says parents can make whatever choices they like, but having children is one of those places when we should be thinking of others (the kids) not ourselves.

I decided against having kids when I reached 40ish for the above reasons (along with some other reasons).

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#155

Post by Someone »

buran77 wrote: post #146
Someone wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes, if cultural expectations lag reality of longer life spans. I think it does; society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality, shaping expectations of what 80-year olds should want, and I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that.

> society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals. Being old and needy is an invisibility cloak. > I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that That "sli…

> If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals

That’s true, but I still think there’s societal pressure on acting old for the elderly.

As a tiny example, if you’re in your 20’s friends and family ask “how’s your job hunt going?”. In your 40’s, they ask “how’s work?”. In your 60s they ask “are you still working?”, even if you’re fit as a fiddle, and even though pension age creeps towards 70 in many countries.

The expectation, basically, is that you work till your mid sixties, enjoy retirement for ten years or so, grow old, and die.

That’s statistically true, but there are outliers. I think that expectation makes some of the outliers at the healthy end reach that final stage slightly earlier than needed.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#156

Post by kazinator »

> Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.

Life imitating Madame Bovary.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#157

Post by tonyedgecombe »

buran77 wrote: post #145
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents are in their eighties and they still have a good quality of life and things to look forward to. They do have some health issues but they aren’t decrepit.

That's good to hear but that wasn't really the topic of the conversation. We were discussing people with life threatening illness where the treatment severely lowers quality of life for a very uncertain outcome. Do you think the "things to look forward to" would incentivize your parents to focus on clinging to life at the expense of drastically increased suffering and plummeting quality of life, or on maximizing the…

I was responding to "there's little to look forward to, they already lived through all the important milestones they could realistically see .." which seems to imply that by 80 life is over and not worth living.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#158

Post by temporary_cat »

man, what an article. my father's a surgeon, and my aunt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer recently. he told me he checked the literature to see that there's a very high mortality rate, and seems to have accepted whats to come. but my aunt and her family is doing the "everything" part. I have a feeling that they're resenting my father for not involving as much as they think he should, and I can see from both angles. I have a feeling that my father would also choose the same path of just retiring and patiently waiting to die in a similar circumstance. I wish both him and people who read this comment a dignified and easy end.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#159

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

tpoacher wrote: post #77

This article is making a LOT of "convenient" assumptions. For all we know, the more likely scenario is that Charlie, like a sizeable percentage of his doctor peers, was burnt out, tired, and depressed, did not really have an overwhelming (some might say "healthy") desire to survive (in fact, perhaps quite the opposite), and saw the cancer as a non-undignified quick "way out". Doctors (and medical professionals more g…

> For all we know, the more likely scenario is that Charlie, like a sizeable percentage of his doctor peers, was burnt out, tired, and depressed, did not really have an overwhelming (some might say "healthy") desire to survive (in fact, perhaps quite the opposite), and saw the cancer as a non-undignified quick "way out".

Why do you consider it "more likely"?

> Doctors (and medical professionals more generally) rank among the highest in occupational risk of mental health disease, especially for things like addiction, alcoholism, generalised anxiety, ptsd, depression and suicide.

You are suggesting that majority of doctors are depressed with suicidal ideation (hence "more likely")? Care to provide a link to research/data?

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