Mary Beard makes the waspish comment that the doctors all say that 'going out like a light' is the way THEY'd like to go, yet they have to put immense effort into keeping people alive who are in dire straits on just about every quality of life measurement.
Maybe it's like a variation on Hillaire Belloc (I think it was him).....
Instead of
"Thou must not kill but need not strive, officiously, to keep alive"....
for that extreme of geriatric care maybe it's
"Thou must not kill, and yet still must strive, officiously, to keep alive"
BUT, of course, what is the alternative (except keeping fit and going out like a light)? Maybe the dreaded DNR notice is the modern equivalent of things like pneumonia, which used to be called 'the old man's friend'.....
I do think, though, that overall, society is at a half way stage at the moment. Our ability to keep people alive has outpaced our ability to keep them alive with a decent quality of life. It's that that has to catch up. And I think our generation has seen the worst of it (I hope!) and will really buy into the 'keep fit and die living' necessity. (On the other hand ,the rising levels of obesity argue against that - though the counter argument is that such people are unlikely to make old bones anyway......)(maybe obesity becomes the new 'pneumonia'??)
It's a very gloomy article by MB, but she has the bracing honesty to look it in the face, which I think a lot of the media don't.
One thing though is for sure, we need, as a society, to invest hugely more resources into 'extreme geriatric care', or else we face two utterly unacceptable alternatives - the kind of abuse that the Panorama programme highlighted, or the exploitation of family as free carers that so many here on the forum know only too well for their own circumstances.
