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