hospice
cmonforton | November 14, 2011She's a hospice nurse. When I tell people her occupation, I typically receive a response like this: "She must be a very special person. I could never work in a place where people go to die." Hospice is a "place," and equating hospice to death, are just two of the misperceptions that hospice care providers and proponents are constantly working to dispel. Providing correct information that hospice is a philosophy of care (not a place) takes on special importance in November because it is National Hospice and Palliative Care month.
Data from 2010 indicates that more than 68% of hospice…
lborkowski | August 5, 2010If you haven't already, go read Atul Gawande's New Yorker article "Letting Go." As a surgeon, Gawande knows how doctors tend to death with terminally ill patients, both because of their training and their ordinary human tendencies. As a writer, he knows how to weave together personal stories and explanations into a seamless portrait of our medical system's dysfunctional approach to death. Here's one of his snapshots:
Recently, while seeing a patient in an intensive-care unit at my hospital, I stopped to talk with the critical-care physician on duty, someone I'd known since college. "I'm…