Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

archive.cancerworld.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 300 posts

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

#181

Post by WJW »

dom96 wrote: post #175
marcus_holmes wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same thing. I often contemplate my death, and how I am going to die. And yes, I derive some comfort from it - knowing I have lived my best life and done the best I could at it. There are things I haven't achieved yet that I want to experience, so I don't want to go just yet. But if it happens, then I'm good with that. But I'm an atheist, and firmly believe that this is all we get, and death really is the e…

What often brings me joy is thinking about my life before birth, I like to think death will be just the same. If so life after death can't be so bad.

Quite so. Lots of people worry about the time they'll "spend" not being alive after they die, but nobody ever seems to worry about they time they spent not being alive before they were born. In the context of the wider universe, "not being" is what you are doing the vast amount of time. The century or so that you are alive is the exception.

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

#182

Post by gerdesj »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #47
gerdesj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the family members making that choice weren't footing the bill" That appears to be the crux of the problem: "footing the bill". It may sound counter intuitive but I have found that when cost is removed from the equation, then better decisions may arise or at least a few extra distortions are removed. When money is directly involved then there are several potential, and in my view damaging, extra approaches that…

12% is a pretty good deal. Many religious organisations want something similar and deliver approximately nothing in return.

The tithe was abolished hereabouts a few years before the NHS was formed.

I think we got a good deal in the end.

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

#183

Post by emn13 »

RickJWagner wrote: post #97
ehnto wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.

I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.) That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.

They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion#/media/File:US_aborti...

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

#184

Post by reubens »

abeppu wrote: post #145

This subverts the message a bit, but my grandmother was sent to a hospice to die as comfortably as possible. I was out of state during her treatment up until this point, but when she was being moved to hospice care, I was told to expect her passing very soon. In this case, her doctors really seemed to have run out of good options; she just hadn't responded to treatment. But, after she was moved to hospice care, she b…

> I don't think exactly that her doctors were wrong in believing that her death was imminent

This is the crux of it. It's hard to predict exactly when people will die. Spend enough time with palliative care physicians and the phrase "if I had a crystal ball" is burned into your memory

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

#186

Post by Thorrez »

pstuart wrote: post #146
dimitrios1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes along with my thesis that if given the proper support, we would avoid the majority of them.

We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.

>a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.

Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.

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

#187

Post by noneeeed »

type0 wrote: post #164
ZWoz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And not suffering, not being in pain was maybe what allowed her to begin to heal. I think that is somewhat well known? I don't have good references about humans, but veterinarian James Alfred Wight (wrote books as James Herriot) has written about it, how lost cause lamb "miraculously" recovered after big dose pain killer (sorry, don't remember details, only his thoughs, how getting rest from pain helps).

> how lost cause lamb "miraculously" recovered after big dose pain killer this probably have to do with movement (which applies to other animals and humans) if they feel pain they don't move, that slows down the blood circulation and the healing process.

This is ultimately what killed my mum. She stopped moving. Once that happens so many things in the body just don't work so well. Combined with her other ailments her body just didn't work properly any more.

She initially went down-hill after she was weaned off the steroids she had been on during treatment for a benign brain tumour. Obviously the tumour and the radiotherapy didn't help things, but her health dropped off a cliff when the steroids stopped, she lost all her strength. I often wonder if she'd still be around now if they had just kept her on them and worked on her mobility.

Keep moving. You don't have to run marathons or go to the gym for it to have a positive effect.

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

#188

Post by Thorrez »

ehnto wrote: post #118
dimitrios1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes along with my thesis that if given the proper support, we would avoid the majority of them.

I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.

I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents.

Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.

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

#189

Post by emn13 »

Thorrez wrote: post #180
lostcolony wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most abortions are as soon as the woman knows she's pregnant. Very, very few are late term, and, as a sibling mentions, those are almost universally due to health risks (possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc). To be clear, you are right that a late term abortion is pretty horrific. They're also -traumatic-. No one is -intentionally- waiting around to get an abortion; there isn't room for…

>those are almost universally due to health risks >But data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1363/4521013 >“[t]here aren’t good data on how often later abortions are for medical reasons.” >“Based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field, Dr. Foster believes that ab…

For perspective, note that the studies you're referring to are studying a rare occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion refers to CDC statistics that 1% of abortions may be at 21+ weeks, but even that is with the caveat that what they're really looking at is medical procedures, and thus that "According to the CDC, due to data collection difficulties the data must be viewed as tentative and some fetal deaths reported beyond 20 weeks may be natural deaths erroneously classified as abortions if the removal of the dead fetus is accomplished by the same procedure as an induced abortion." Additionally, 56% of women declined to participate in the study, and there will surely be some correlation between that choice and the cause for the termination.

Of course that doesn't invalidate the findings; but it is a a fairly small number of events they're talking about here, that's all.

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

#190

Post by TeMPOraL »

birksherty wrote: post #149
SCLeo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Family members can pressure the patient to give up.

Family also pressure to give birth even in cases where the potential child leads a terrible life and it's abused too.

This is the reverse case, though. Plus, child abuse can in principle be found out and mitigated. Death is irreversible.

Incentives are different too. Outside of highly fundamentalist cultures, there isn't really a strong benefit to a family from pressuring someone to keep a child. In developed countries, children are a huge liability for the first ~20 years of their life. Meanwhile, with assisted suicide, there are strong incentives around cessation of ongoing medical care (costs), and obviously inheritance.

Between that and possibility of presenting some murders as assisted suicide, I think if the idea is to be implemented, it really needs to be done extra carefully.

Post reply on HN