Doctors and Interventions

Suppose you were dying; what would want done to you to keep you alive? Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Joseph Gallo put this question to hundreds of aging doctors and got the results above. The only intervention a majority of doctors would want is pain medicine. Ninety percent would refuse CPR, and nearly 90 percent would refuse ventilation.

Doing CPR on hospitalized patients is cruel. We deprive people of a chance for a quick end, and in the name of what? Only about 3% of hospital patients who receive CPR are in good health a month later.

Ventilation is so awful, says USC professor Ken Murray, that we wouldn't do it to terrorists. Yet we do it to dying patients all the time. What happened to doing no harm?