Doctors Want to Die in Peace

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

I'm an anesthesiologist and I've noticed that I never seem to see a sick physician undergoing futile end-of-life care. I've talked about this with my colleagues and we all agree that we would never want to be put through much of the end-of-life care that we routinely give to others.

Another:

I work in end-of-life care, and I see this phenomenon all the time. I believe doctors eschew aggressive life-prolonging treatment because they've seen and understand the futility and suffering that are part and parcel of it.

They were responding to a study that argued:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.