Opinion: More Americans are dying at home. Is that a good thing?
How Americans die has fundamentally changed with advances in medical technology and the ways diseases are treated. For centuries, death commonly occurred in one’s home with care provided by relatives and community members. Yet since the 1960s, the hospital and intensive care unit have become places of passage as people approach the end.
In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, we report that home has become the most common place of death among Americans dying of natural causes for the first time since the early 20th century, while deaths in hospitals and nursing facilities have declined. Our analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics also showed striking differences in place of death according to who you are and what you die of: individuals who are nonwhite or those dying from diseases other than cancer are less likely to die at home than those who are white or those who die from cancer.
Read Original Article: Opinion: More Americans are dying at home. Is that a good thing? »
