----- Original Message ---- From: Andy <andy274 at gmail.com>
One of the factoids I've seen floating around is that some huge percentage of the cost is incurred in the last months of life. This may be the sort of thing that makes sense when people still are likely to have a decade or two in them, but you have to wonder about heroic cancer treatment for people much older than 70, when you get to the point where something's gonna get you. There was an interesting book _How We Die_ that noted that autopsies of elderly people who died of one of stroke/cancer/heart disease suggested that they were on the verge of being taken down by one of the other causes in the triad.
[WS:] I thought about quite a bit lately, as my dad passed away from stomach cancer last month. This was, however, in Poland. The surgeon who operated on him decided not to remove the tumor (which would have been a heroic treatment, given my dad's advanced age -85) but instead used a simple stop-gap measure (some sort of bypass) which essentially starved him to death in the time span of 4 months but prevented metastasis, which would have resulted in a much more painful death. He died without the need for palliative treatment, albeit caring for him toward the end was very difficult and we transferred him to an inpatient hospice. BTW, death of starvation seems to be "good death" vs. prolonged suffering, as the following NYT piece suggests http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9404E7DE143EF932A05754C0A9659C8B63
An interesting factoid is that his whole treatment did not cost our family much - as most of it was covered by the single payer public health care system. I can only conjecture how much the US health business would milk their patients (and the insurers) in similar situations.
In any case, this whole experience made me even more resolved to support euthanasia - not just in the technical sense i.e. by making this option available, but also in teh social sense - by creating the supportive culture that would make it easier for the patient to make that decision (and their families to accept that decision) when the time come. I think that the opposition to that solution by some medical professional and religious shysters is disservice to humanity - their pretenses nothwithstanding.
Wojtek