Panda with more on futile end-of-life care:
My European friends, some of them physicians, are amazed at the measures we take to keep patients alive who have absoutely no quality of life and no chance of recovery. The Europeans may have cradle-to-grave socialism but they have a fairly well-defined idea of when to let the patient go to their grave. In the United States it seems sometimes that we want to follow the patient into the mausoleum, trying to the very last to get one more day or even one more hour of life for the patient regardless of cost.
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{ 1 comment }
I think end-of-life attitudes have got to have a class bias.
Every single one of my relatives has stated, multiple times, that they do not want to end their lives hooked up to machines in hospitals.
Are there people out there telling their children they want them to “do everything even if it means I’m an o-mouthed vegetable in a bed?”
Is it that if you’ve enjoyed a prosperous life you are more willing to let it go even if you aren’t paying the bill?
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