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How Doctors Die


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2021 Apr 4, 8:35am   503 views  7 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/03/how-doctors-die/

What’s unusual about medical professionals is not how much treatment they get when faced with a terminal illness—but how little.

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).

Almost all medical professionals have seen too much of what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

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1   Onvacation   2021 Apr 4, 9:21am  

" primum non nocere,"

First, do no harm.
2   MMR   2021 Apr 4, 10:57am  

Patrick says
how much treatment they get when faced with a terminal illness—but how little.


-exactly; no one who knows the limits of medicine wants to be resuscitated when faced with a terminal condition. Its very rare that resuscitation even works in the hospital, especially with older pts with multiple comorbidities.

most lay people don't know what spending last days in the hospital is like; doctors do, and do the best they can to avoid being there if at all possible.

-most 'futile care' is performed on people who don't have a durable power of attorney or living will and/or have surrogates who don't agree on an appropriate course of action.

-usually the family members who live far away and are not engaged in the parents lives are the ones who feel guilty and insist that their parents/loved ones are 'full code' in the midst of a terminal illness or illness with poor prognosis
3   Ceffer   2021 Apr 4, 11:12am  

Doctors don't have to apply that interface of ooga booga medicine man superstition and social sanction to themselves. A lot of medical torture is legally and socially mandated to keep everybody off the guilt and finger pointing hook. Also, twenty percent of medical bucks go to 'end of life' treatments, for people who are terminal and have no hope of returning to productive or meaningful lives, so it is a big industry.

So, doctors will soak Medicare and the payment modalities to maintain end stage conditions, but won't allow themselves to be placed in those pits of despair and suffering.
4   Patrick   2023 Aug 5, 5:18pm  

https://palexander.substack.com/p/the-hidden-harms-of-cpr-the-brutal


The Hidden Harms of CPR; The brutal procedure can save lives, but only in particular cases. Why has it become a default treatment? Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly nearly eighty-five per cent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos; it is an open secret in medicine that CPR is both brutal and rarely effective.

‘The result, done correctly, is akin to assault. The force of compressions can shatter ribs and breastbones, puncture lungs, bruise the heart, and cause major blood vessels to rupture. Repeated electrical shocks can burn flesh. Even if the procedure restores a heartbeat, brain damage—whether mild memory loss or a vegetative state—occurs in forty per cent of hospitalized patients.’
5   HeadSet   2023 Aug 5, 6:30pm  

Onvacation says

" primum non nocere,"

First, do no harm.

What Pfizer et al, has shown is that "Primum non nocere" has been replaced with "Primum, mercedem pro eo."
6   Ceffer   2023 Aug 5, 6:36pm  

In professions, certain virtue signaling rituals become canonized and turned into ongoing financial industries imposed by guilt with 'instructors' doing very well giving courses about them. CPR is one of those. Once the industry is established, it is hard to go back. CPR even has different religious variations depending on who is hawking the standards.

That being said, I would do it if the situation required it. Defibrillating paddles are a reasonable idea, but I think expecting any lay person to have the coordination to implement such a thing, even with all idiot proofing scenarios, is beyond the pale.

CPR is exhausting to do. If in doubt, maybe just to positionally open the airway, sweep, and apply M to M breathing. There are strange stories of people who tried to do CPR in an excited panic, and had heart attacks over the first victim. Also, with the vax today being all over the place, who knows what is what.

You even have to be careful about opening the airway, because with a neck injury, you could cause more spinal cord injury by repositioning. Bummer. That's why the paramedics always carefully install a neck support brace.
7   clambo   2023 Aug 6, 10:00am  

Doctors treat people sometimes beyond what someone else believes they should because they do not like refusing treatment to anyone.

They may not agree but they're not interested in being perceived as the "bad guy" in this situation.

I know of two cases of people in their 90's who were very healthy and weren't senile (unlike Biden), who fell in the night which led to their ultimate demise.

One of the two was my father, who was an MD.

I will not fall going to take a piss in the middle of the night; recently I have been using a plastic urinal jug because of a surgery, and I will probably continue to piss in the jug from the safety of my bed as I get older.

I may gross out people, but I'm not falling going to the bathroom in the middle of the night like my father did.

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