How Doctors Die

Guest: Zara Cooper, MD, Surgeon and Researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston  The fact is we will all die, but very few of us are comfortable accepting that without making every effort to delay it. Our medical system also defaults to lots of interventions when the end-of-life is near – hospitalization, surgery, invasive treatments. And many, many people have a hard time saying no to intervention, no matter how unlikely it is to prolong life. Saying “no” to last-ditch treatment feels like saying “yes” to death.   But the doctors performing those procedures tend to make very different choices when facing their own death. Researchers have long suspected that doctors chose to die differently from the rest of us.