Reply to Bias towards elderly who will not go quietly

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Absolutely terrible thread title, BTW. [/quote]

Agreed, it is a disgusting title.

I am an attorney who changed careers and have been working in mostly hospice care for the last near decade. The majority of my patients have been elderly, but some were DNR based on chronic degenerative conditions at younger ages.

I’ve noticed that the majority of doctors are just as uncomfortable as the average person with having conversations about death. They may be more matter of fact about it in their own thinking, but they don’t really want to talk about it with patients. There is a lot of avoidance of spelling things out plainly to people who are avoiding accepting it themselves. Even some doctors and nurses who work in HOSPICE, whose jobs are all about helping dying patients die, sometimes push too far to keep people on the alive side of things even if it means prolonging discomfort.

I can’t agree with your OP at all, not the ugly thread title. The truth is that the situation in American medicine is overwhelmingly the flip side of the coin - we spend astronomically to keep people alive in the final years or months, and often causing much anguish in the process for patients and families alike. All because we can’t talk about death in this country and most folks are terrified of it.

As to your parents OP - this is a well tread area of medical ethics and not some ageism bias of the doctors. When patients are in their 80s and beyond, they are statistically much less likely to fully recover from many procedures and treatments - exponentially less likely than a patient in their 50s, 60s, or even 70s. Same with their statistical likelihood of experiencing complications which hasten greater disability and/or death.

This factors into the physician’s determination of what is in the best interests of the patient, and no doctor is required to perform a surgery or treatment on a patient if they feel it is going against their best interests. Some doctors are skilled at explaining this and others just hem and haw and avoid flat out saying how things are. It has nothing to do with a lack of caring about your loved one. I would argue that there is more caring on offer from someone who nudges you in the direction of recognizing your impending mortality than in steering you toward further denial.
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Thanks for this comment from the front lines.[/quote]

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