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The New York Times has a long form profile of a doctor who operates a hospice for dying patients. A fascinating look into a subject most people are afraid to even think about.
Now, at the morning meeting, [Dr. B. J.] Miller began describing the case of a young man named Randy Sloan, a patient at U.C.S.F. who died of an aggressive cancer a few weeks earlier at Zen Hospice. In a way, Sloan's case was typical. It passed through all the same medical decision points and existential themes the doctors knew from working with their own terminal patients. But here, the timeline was so compressed that those themes felt distilled and heightened.
And then there was the bracing idiosyncrasy of everything Miller's staff had been able to do for Sloan at Zen Hospice. Rabow told me that all palliative-care departments and home-hospice agencies believe patients' wishes should be honored, but Zen Hospice's small size allows it to "actualize" these ideals more fully. When Miller relayed one detail about Sloan's stay at the hospice — it was either the part about the sailing trip or the wedding — one doctor across the conference table expelled what seemed to be an involuntary, admiring, "What?"
Everything Miller was saying had a way of sharpening an essential set of questions: What is a good death? How do you judge? In the end, what matters? You got the sense that looking closely at Sloan's case might even get you close to some answers or, at least, less hopelessly far away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:05AM
Aging and cancer are curable. Once that happens, hospice care and health insurance as you know them will be obsolete.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:56AM
Either of them? Possibly. Both at the same time? I doubt it.
The very mechanism that causes us to age also protects us from cancer: The limitation that cells cannot divide indefinitely. A cell can only become a cancer cell if it overcomes that hurdle.
No. Cancer and old age are by far not the only causes of illness and death. Indeed, even today cancer is only second, after heart disease.
Also, whatever cure for cancer we might find, you willhave to pay for it. So the need for health insurance will remain.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @10:30AM
> even today cancer is only second, after heart disease
Maybe in Fatsoland.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:05PM
Right. From Health, United States, 2015:
-- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm [cdc.gov]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:07PM
*Those are the numbers of deaths in 2014.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @01:26PM
Your information is a little out of date. Overcoming the Hayflick limit is only one of several different things that must go wrong to cause a cancer, and while getting past it may increase the likelyhood of cancer, there are other targets to kill it/cure you. By the time we have developed the tech to cure ageing, cancer will be a doddle.
(Score: 2) by driven on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:25PM
If your mental capacity declines far enough, living forever without cancer is pretty pointless.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:09PM
"All those people with their healthy lifestyles will look really dumb in fifty years, dying of nothing"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:58PM
Ah, another low energy comment.