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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Children. Grandparents. Getting some writing done. Dying with dignity. Those were just a few of your responses this week when we asked you — FRONTLINE viewers — to use the hashtag #WhatMattersMost to tell us about what has the greatest meaning in your lives. Our new film, Being Mortal, based on Dr. Atul Gawande’s New […]
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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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CancerNews
“It’s Very Hard to Come to the Realization That You’re Dying”
by explainingmedicine June 10, 2016Doctors who need to break the worst possible news to patients don’t just have to overcome their own discomfort about talking about death. They must also overcome the fact that some patients and loved ones aren’t prepared to accept the news. “Frequently, as an emergency surgeon, I’m meeting somebody for the first time and they […]
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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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CancerNews
Podcast: The Long Tail, the Lottery and “Being Mortal”
by explainingmedicine June 10, 2016When famed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesotheliaoma, a rare form of cancer, in 1982, he examined the research on survival rates. What Gould found wasn’t encouraging: median survival after receiving this particular diagnosis was only about eight months. But, as Gould wrote in a now-famous essay, he found hope in […]
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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 […]