The Limits Of Medicine

As the headline suggests, this article is about death and the options left for doctors and patients when there’s nothing to do to stop it.

The author introduces us to the stories of several terminally ill patients and how they go about their lives knowing that they will soon die. The text is flowing with medical terms and detailed accounts of the treatments prescribed and of the patients' declining health. This is usually tedious, but in this case it just helps to build a thorough picture of what the day-to-day reality of someone who’s dying looks like.

The case the author (who is also a surgeon) makes is that there’s too little effort put into providing the dying with a good quality of life, free of pain and discomfort, in their last months or weeks. The main focus now is on battling the disease. And of course that’s the thing to do usually. But in some cases, like the ones circumstantially described here, there are limits to what medicine can do. So maybe the focus should be shifted to other aspects, like teaching doctors how to lay out the situation for a terminally ill patient and their family, or maybe investing time and money in hospices that can offer some comfort at the end of their lives.

It could be that lately I have overdosed on stuff about death (like Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking and Adam Ruins Everything’s episode about death), but I do think we should have this conversation about how we die, if not for self-insight, at least to save ourselves and our dear ones from unnecessary pain.