We Have Medicalized Aging, And That Experiment

Once You Start To Ask Patients About Their Priorities, You Discover What They're Living For. Once You Uncover That, It Helps You, As A Doctor, Decide What To Fight For. And When We Do That, We Often End Up Identifying Limits To The Kind Of Care That People Want. One's Assumption Is That These People Are Going To Live Shorter Lives, But What We're Doing Is Protecting Quality Of Life. In Doing So, You Sometimes End Up Helping People Live Longer. Certainly, You Help People Live Better Days And With More Purpose In Their Lives.

Life Is Choices, And They Are Relentless. No Sooner Have You Made One Choice Than Another Is Upon You.

We Have Medicalized Aging, And That Experiment Is Failing Us.

We Look For Medicine To Be An Orderly Field Of Knowledge And Procedure. But It Is Not. It Is An Imperfect Science, An Enterprise Of Constantly Changing Knowledge, Uncertain Information, Fallible Individuals, And At The Same Time Lives On The Line. There Is Science In What We Do, Yes, But Also Habit, Intuition, And Sometimes Plain Old Guessing. The Gap Between What We Know And What We Aim For Persists. And This Gap Complicates Everything We Do.

The Definition Of What It Means To Be Dying Has Changed Radically. We Are Able To Extend People's Lives Considerably, Including Sometimes, Good Days.