Another call for just letting the elderly die gracefully without all that unseemly, distasteful medical intervention runs in today’s Times. “You end up with situations where a 90-year-old with organ failure is brought to an emergency room and the doctors go, ‘Let’s tune her up.’ Or if the patient starts failing at the nursing home, they’ll say: ‘No one dies here. Let’s get her to the emergency room,’” says Dr. Robert Martensen.
Interesting choice of patient gender, in light of another of today’s stories on a related topic. Controlling for the patient’s prognosis, a recent study found that women 75 and older were 59 percent less likely than their male counterparts to be placed on a kidney transplant list, and that a similar but smaller discrepancy held for women between 45 and 75. One of the researchers speculated that “caregivers, family members and maybe the patients perceived older women to be more frail than they really are.” More expendable, certainly. In case you were wondering just whom might be favored to die with the most grace. (And do you suppose it’s possible that this effect could occur for lower-income patients as well? Nah…)
A squared resident | 20-Jan-09 at 8:22 pm | Permalink
Bingo. At least that’s what the statistics say.
this blog is overrated | 20-Jan-09 at 8:27 pm | Permalink
Women also made up an overwhelming majority of Kevorkian’s patients, and some were not terminally ill. I’m not sure if lower-income people had access to him, but if assisted suicide were to become legal, I would be very concerned about the implications for equality — gender, racial, economic, etc. — when we all know that some people are more likely to be conditioned to see themselves as a burden on society.
Obama! | 21-Jan-09 at 4:43 am | Permalink
Maybe he can fix it…