In his book Being Mortal, writer and surgeon Atul Gawande has a chapter titled “Hard Conversations.” He writes about the extremely difficult, yet ultimately rewarding conversations his father, who was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor, had with his loved ones and with his doctors. The conversations allowed Gawande’s father to make critical decisions about his […]
PBS
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If you knew you were dying, what would you do with the time you had left? For Debbie Whitmore, a young mother diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, the answer was simple: spend quality time, including a trip to Disney World, with her husband and four children. Debbie and her family share their story in […]
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Being Mortal examines how doctors can help terminally ill patients make the most of the time they have left. Should they undergo any treatment, no matter how agonizing, in order to stay alive? Or should they try to spend as much quality time as possible with the people they love. We want to hear from […]
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NewsSleep
Prolonging Life or Prolonging Death? Two Doctors on Caring for the Critically Sick
by PBS June 10, 2016For doctors, there are rarely easy decisions to be made when it comes to the care of someone who is critically ill. In some cases, a bleak prognosis may require them to advise a patient against continuing their treatment. Other times, they may see cause for optimism, however remote it may seem. Knowing how or when […]
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Is there any such thing as a good death? It’s a question that got Christopher Woolf, the news editor and resident “history guy” at Public Radio International’s The World thinking. The fact is, says Woolf, that in the course of human history, there might be no better time than the present to be alive. Consider that as […]
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Allen Chou was just 27 when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His girlfriend, Linda Sim, was 25. We usually think of death and dying as problems for the elderly. Usually, when a couple needs to make decisions about how to spend their last days together, they are late in life and can look back on […]
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One of the nation’s largest dental management chains, Aspen Dental, violated New York law by making decisions that should have been left to dentists and sharing profits with dental clinics, according to a settlement with the state’s attorney general. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman launched an investigation of the chain in 2013 after […]
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There are things Isaac loves about being on testosterone. It’s “a super fun drug in some ways,” says Isaac, who is now 20 years old. Isaac was among the first wave of kids in the U.S. to medically transition from one gender to another. In middle school, he cut his hair and started dressing in […]