The NY Times talks about the hospice movement

“Hospice today is as different from its grass-roots origins as Charles Meys is from Florence Nightingale. It began in the 1960’s as an antiestablishment, largely volunteer movement advocating a gentle death as an alternative to the medicalized death many people had come to dread. People still dread those deaths; surveys show most of us want to die at home, not in a hospital, and want to die naturally, not hooked up to life support. But in recent years, hospice itself has become institutionalized, and it no longer means quite what most people take it to mean. Today there are hospice patients on ventilators, hospice patients with feeding tubes, hospice patients getting pacemakers, hospice patients receiving blood transfusions and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, hospice patients who panic when they can’t breathe and call 911.”