This episode of Radiolab I cannot recommend more as someone who has worked in medicine (and I do not pull that card often). It is important to think about how you want to die in medical terms, and make sure your wishes are clear to your family and personal medical professionals.
Producer Sean Cole introduces us to Joseph Gallo, a doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins University who discovered something striking about what doctors were not willing to do to save their own lives. As part of the decades-long Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, Gallo found himself asking the study’s aging doctor-subjects questions about death. Their answers, it turns out, don’t sync up with the answers most of us give.
Ken Murray, a doctor who’s written several articles about how doctors think about death, explains that there’s a huge gap between what patients expect from life-saving interventions (such as CPR, ventilation, and feeding tubes), and what doctors think of these very same procedures.
Jad attempts to bridge the gap with a difficult conversation — he asks his father, a doctor, why he’s made the decisions he has about his own end-of-life care… and whether it was different when he had to answer the same questions for his father and mother.
A chart of doctor responses from the Precursors Study:
