Doctors may encourage early deaths

Doctors may encourage early deaths :

"The psychiatric study of more than 250 doctor-patient pairs found that the relationship between the two was an important factor in a patient's wish to hasten death.

The Queensland researchers also found that doctors with less training in the psychological aspects of medicine and counselling were more likely to want their patient to die sooner."

When I looked after my mother when she was dying of cancer, I learned some enormously useful lessons and they were all from her in her terminal stages. She managed the pain and demise of it all with enormous dignity and lived until her last day. The system constantly offered her priests - what do I want with one of those right now? , lectures on accepting her death...I am not dead yet...and she was sent home to die after she had been pushed through test after test after test day in day out for months. The two GPs I had access to at home were the most compassionate and understanding. They kept her spirits up, they treated her with respect and dignity and they made her laugh. They were not frightened to make her laugh...even on the day before she died when she could hardly talk, the GP had a smile on her lips because he called her a liar when she said she was all right when he asked how she was. My mother put it all into perspective for me. You are alive. Always alive. You can still teach people and they can still learn and it is important to stay free of pain. My mother did not complain. Not once. She took it all and just said one day - I have a bit of a sore stomach which I don't think I can manage today. She taught all her carers a lesson which they valued. Her most profound statement, though, was the one she said to the domicilary nurse who came every day and who tried to get her to accept her death. "How can you live when you are thinking about dying?" The nurse took that on board. Terminally ill patients are usually confronted every minute with their death. So they never think about life. My mother taught me that you can make the most of every minute even when the odds are stacked against you. When the time comes you will not have a choice and she knew that. Why focus on that? She enjoyed everyone's company and even valued sitting stroking my dog until she no longer had a choice.