Tonight on the Daily Show, the guest was Atul Gawande. He is a doctor and talked about his book "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" From what he said in the 7 minute interview with Jon Stewart, he is in perfect accord with what I advocated in this thread. Counter-intuitively, he said that fatally ill people who forego the expensive, high-tech medical procedures to extend their lives actually live 25% longer!
Here is a link to his book and a description which says in part "Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit." [
www.amazon.com]
Catch his interview on the Daily Show if you can.