Death is no longer just in the hands of god or fate, but often a decision

"On 30 October 2017 I had just landed at Heathrow from Melbourne. I had the strangest feeling I should not go directly to bed. I wondered if I should visit my mother, Margaret Black, a 92 year old retired anaesthetist living very independently in a warden assisted housing complex in Kent. At midday I got a call from my sister—mum had developed abdominal pain, pressed the alarm button, and phoned her GP. Could I go?

There is much discussion about the right of an individual to die, but not enough about the role of relatives and friends"  Dr. Black's essay is powerfully resonant with our lives.

Black ME. Death is no longer just in the hands of god or fate, but often a decision.  BMJ. 2018 May 22;361:k2217.

Full BMJ article

How We Shun The Mortally Ill

Richard Smith's: "How we shun the mortally ill" appeared in the BMJ Opinion October 10, 2017 is a definite Keeper

"When you develop a mortal illness, as you will do if you’re not one of the fifth of the population who dies suddenly, you are likely to find that many friends desert you. The same will happen if somebody in your family develops such an illness. And if you’re a doctor then the people most likely to shun you are your medical colleagues. The isolation of the seriously ill and their relatives is the great unrecognised scandal of our age, said Neil Vickers, reader in English literature and medical humanities at King’s College London, at a recent symposium on Ambiguities and Paradoxes in Clinical Medicine. The able bodied in this way make the suffering of the seriously ill much worse."

Importantly, Smith references the famous 1982 article in the New England Journal of Medicine by the endocrinologist David Rabin from Vanderbilt Medical Center who described how when he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis he became isolated from most of his fellow physicians.