At least one-third of patients receive non-beneficial treatments at the end of their life. Having a good advance care directive that you share with others helps them know and respect your wishes.
How best do we teach our kids that the world is not always as we’d like it to be? The ‘when’ can be out of parents’ control, but there are parts of the ‘how’ that are more manageable.
Most people in western societies die in hospital or in institutional care. Keeping death out of sight and out of mind means few people have real experience of death and dying.
Conversations around end-of-life medical care can be challenging. Consider someone I’ll call Mrs. Jones, an elderly patient with advanced heart disease. When her doctor asked her to discuss the kind of…
When I was three years old my brother was born. He had a heart condition, and after being in and out of hospital for the whole of his little life, he died when I was five. The time after he was gone was…
A. David Lewis, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Among comic book fans, there’s the joke that the only characters in superhero comics who stay dead are Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, Batman’s parents, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky. For everybody else…
Every year around half a million people die in England. The success of medicine over the past decades has led to a sustained rise in the average human life expectancy: a third of children born today will…
Even before its second reading in the House of Lords, Lord Falconer’s assisted dying bill has been stirring up controversy. High level support for the bill from important religious leaders such as former…
Debate about euthanasia flares up in Australia every few months but, for some reason, it never gets very far. The latest round started late last month, when urologist and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia…
“I want an untamed, beautiful death. So I think we should have a competition in dying, sort of like Halloween costumes,” wrote Anatole Broyard in his pathography, Intoxicated by my Illness, written in…
Go ahead and contemplate your own mortality. How does it feel? Would you be surprised to learn that it can potentially improve your mental health to think about your death more often? The Russian novelist…
Contrary to the popular wisdom that it’s a taboo subject, we love discussing death. Dead bodies fascinate us and some of our favourite television shows have been about death and forensic pathology. But…
The sudden death of a previously healthy young individual is a rare but tragic event. Every year about one in 100,000 people aged between one and 35 dies suddenly of a natural cause. The vast majority…