The subtitle -- It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be -- is a little cryptic, but these early paragraphs present a good summary of how doctors choose to live their last days, weeks and months:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
See also: Paula Span's post at The New Old Age blog at NYTimes:
Dr. Murray contends in his post that doctors know too much about the futility of aggressive end-of-life treatment to subject themselves to it. His argument is anecdotal, based on people he has known but lacking statistical underpinnings. “It’s a fair criticism,” he said.
But recently an alert reader e-mailed him a study, published in 2008 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, of more than 800 physicians who graduated from Johns Hopkins University between 1948 and 1964. Most had reached their late 60s and 70s, so questions about end-of-life treatment were not purely hypothetical.
Asked what treatment they would accept if they’d suffered irreversible brain damage that left them unable to speak or recognize people but was not terminal, the doctors overwhelmingly said they’d decline CPR, feeding tubes and a host of other common interventions. “So there is actual evidence about this,” Dr. Murray said, pleased.
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