A great companion piece is <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...</a><p><i>You may have read the excellent article How Doctors Die. If you haven’t, do it now. It says that most doctors, knowing everything I’ve just mentioned above, choose to die quickly and with very limited engagement with the health system.</i><p><i>...I think if I were very debilitated and knew I would die soon, I would want to go to that park or one like it on a very sunny day, surround myself with my friends and family, say some last words, and give myself an injection of potassium chloride.</i><p><i>This will never happen. Or if it did, it would be some kind of huge scandal, and whoever gave me the potassium chloride would be fired or something. But the people dying demented and hopeless connected to half a dozen tubes in ICU rooms aren’t considered scandals by anybody. That’s just “the natural way of things”.</i><p><i>...21st century American hospitals do not need to “cultivate a culture of life”. We have enough life. We have life up the wazoo. We have more life than we know what to do with. We have life far beyond the point where it becomes a sick caricature of itself. We prolong life until it becomes a sickness, an abomination, a miserable and pathetic flight from death that saps out and mocks everything that made life desirable in the first place.</i>