Also, check out the August 2nd New Yorker for the article, Letting Go, by Atul Gawande. It's a long read for a magazine article, but it may be the most important piece you read this year. It refers to the work done at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital and the impact on the residents of La Crosse, Wisconsin. In the New Yorker article, Gawande comments on the perspective of many that death is the ultimate enemy and there is nothing reproachable in those who rage against it:
"I think of [this] every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What's wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, UNLESS it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that's vastly more probable. The trouble is that we've built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets--and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan."
