we're all going to die
"Our relentless search for wellness through medicine has created a kind of therapeutic imperative, the urge to treat every complaint, every deviation from the norm, as a medical condition. We’ve come to believe that if a test can be performed, it should be performed; if a treatment can be used to lengthen life, no matter how incrementally, it should be used, regardless of whether the intervention will improve the patient’s sense of well-being, or is what the patient really wants. Families often tell doctors to “do everything possible” for their elderly and dying loved ones, often without realizing that “doing everything” won't necessarily stave off death for so long but could make the patient’s last few days or weeks more miserable than they might have been. Physicians, too, forget that their power to prolong life is limited, and that they are still able only “to cure, sometimes; to relieve, often; to comfort, always”, in the words of a French proverb.”
I guess I may get labeled as insensitive when I say this. But sometimes I get frustrated with all the rhetoric you hear about finding cures for diseases, especially ones relating to aging, such as certain types of cancers, Alzheimer’s, stroke etc… I get frustrated because we talk about prevention and cures for these diseases as though we could ward off death indefinitely.
On average, one hundred thousand dollars are spent per Medicare recipient in the last two years of life, from numerous tests for problems, to treatments that promise to prolong life for a few more months, to nasogastric feeding tubes and breathing machines designed to keep people alive far beyond what their natural bodies would allow.
We are all going to die someday. Why not accept it and do it with dignity? Why not do it without putting a huge burden on the health care system? Perhaps it’s better to die 10 years earlier, than to spend 20 years undergoing multiple treatments for various “diseases” that are but products of aging.
This is not to say that I’m against medical research altogether relating to aging or against any sort of medical treatment for the elderly. I do believe that they should be cared for and should be enabled to live their lives as fully as possible. But I guess because of this very belief, I agree with Brownlee—I wish the medical research we engage in and the treatments we use for the elderly would be more focused on alleviating their suffering and promoting their ability to enjoy the last years of their life, rather than trying to “cure” them of what is inevitably their old age and proximity to death.
But maybe I can only say this, because I'm young and haven't yet experienced the gradual decline of my body-- the aching of joints, the susceptibility to falls, the fuzziness of memory.... Perhaps because I haven't known my body becoming something other than my body as I know it, that I can say these words so easily. Perhaps because I have yet to experience the passing of a close friend or family member, that death for me is still an abstract concept that I can wax and wane eloquent on without actually knowing anything.
But we are all going to die. Maybe one day we will cure all cancers, but we will never be able to escape death.
“So little of what is done for old people seems aimed in any direct way at making the patient feel better. With medicalization, the role of physicians has become so expanded and technologized that we fail at our most important task—providing relief from suffering. Medical care of the elderly is particularly distorted by this new focus. Medicalization externalized experience, whereas the major tasks of aging are internal. Every clinician has witnessed the medicalized 80-year-old obsessed with arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and serum cholesterol levels. Contrast the patient with someone else in the same physical condition, who admits that her knees are bad and that she has trouble remembering things. Which patient is better off? Attention to some proto-illnesses arguably could benefit 80- and 90-year-olds: certainly osteoporosis, probably also high blood pressure. But 80-year-olds can ill afford the ceding of responsibility and loss of control inherent in medicalization. The challenges of very old age are spiritual, not medical. The appropriate role of the physician is a counselor or helper, not as scientific expert."
1 comments:
"Death has been swallowed up in victory;
Where, O Death, is your victory?
Where, O Death, is your sting?"
- 1 Cor 15:54-55
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