Oregon’s public health division has released statistics on deaths under its physician-assisted suicide (PAS) legislation. It shows a steady increase in the number of lethal prescriptions and in the number of deaths. In 1998, the first year after PAS was legalized, there were 24 prescriptions and 16 deaths. In 2011, there were 114 prescriptions and […]
Oregon assisted suicide update … Read More »
roundtable discussion … CAPC IPAL-ICU website …
palliative care in the icu … Read More »
Recently I asked my sober priest friend Monsignor Richey how I’d know if I was making any spiritual progress. The pious urge to pray many hours a day? I was thinking. Guru status? He pondered for a moment. “If crazy people aren’t afraid to come up to you and talk … that’s a pretty good
presence … (defined) Read More »
Salpeter et. al. summarize prognostic factors in cancer and non-cancer diagnoses that are consistently associated with a survival of 6 months or less. “Despite different cancer characteristics, a fairly universal picture of terminal disease included decreasing performance status, advancing age, weight loss, metastatic disease, disease recurrence, and laboratory abnormalities indicating extensive disease. Most of the
prognosis factors marking 6 month survival … Read More »
Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wandered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over this earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves
giving ourselves into the hands of death … Read More »
18 years after his stillborn daughter was born,Steven Guy said: “I have moved on; I can talk about the day she died and not cry, sometimes…She has changed me from the shy insecure person I was then to the openly emotional, caring, supportive, and strong man I am now.” The Lancet discusses grief in the
grief and growth … Read More »
David Weissman … Next Gen Palliative Care Diane Meier … first chapter of her Palliative Care text … interview with Diane Rehm Atul Gawande … New Yorker article NEJM study palliative care in lung cancer
palliative care resources … Read More »
“… a serious change is afoot and not just in the meaning of profound loss. Technology’s attendant rational technical practices of classifying, diagnosing, and intervening do not just change the world; they carry the potential to make up new people. So does the cultural sensibility of new generations to use psychoactive substances to manage the
grief … an opportunity for growth? … or a disease? Read More »
… it is of an Other … not a consolation that we invent. “The true challenge for anyone is the presence of reality, the wonder it evokes in us, the attraction with which it draws us. It is precisely because we are often disloyal, as I said this morning, that we cannot acknowledge this, and
the design is not ours … Read More »
“ … what one suffers is beyond one’s control – suffering is what one undergoes, what happens, what one endures. One cannot control true suffering. Suffering is what remains when one’s control runs out. And the very fact that it is beyond one’s control means that it helps to define one’s limits. To be a
suffering is what remains when control runs out … Read More »
