Traveling The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death In 2017

My mother has a letter from her mother written in 1942, telling of the death from pneumonia of a middle-aged neighbor with whom my grandmother had spoken at the post office just a week earlier. For most of human history, that sudden turn to death has been the common experience. Few managed to live into old age; and even for elders, the dying was usually fairly abrupt. There was little risk of living long with dementia, Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, cirrhosis, serious injuries, childbirth complications, or other fatal illnesses. Diabetes was fatal within a few months in 1900. Now, most of us will instead experience a long period of decline in advanced old age. The period of being unable to take care of yourself (mobility, dressing, feeding, toileting) averages more than two years in the last phase of life. During that time, we each will need another person’s help every day—often around the clock. And our society has not even figured out how to talk about the situation, much less how to reorganize to make this newly expectable phase of life comfortable and meaningful, or affordable. US society seems stuck in an era of “happy talk.” When a fireman pulls a child from a swimming pool, it seems appropriate to call it “saving a life.” But how many times have you seen the newspaper headline touting a new drug or device that will “save X thousands of lives,” when, at best, it will delay the dying of very sick and usually elderly people by some months before...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: End of Life & Serious Illness elder care health care reform long-term care reform MediCaring Communities Program of All-Inclusive Care of the Elderly Source Type: blogs