Diagnosing dying: is it time for doctors to write “dying certificates”?

“Humans are gardens to tend, not machines to fix.” Source: One of the author’s Mums….and she was right.Few people are scared of being dead, but many of us fear dying. This is because death is a pain free point in time, whereas dying is a process. Despite the fact that all of us will face both of those “D words,” many doctors, nurses, patients, and families overdo a third “D word”—denial. In this biotechnologically obsessed world, we are becoming increasingly less able to countenance a “natural death,” or to understand what truly matters in our final days.It feels like patients and practitioners now increasingly channel Dylan Thomas’s poetry as we “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”1 The intensive care units that we work in are a technical marvel, no question. But for those who are already dying when they arrive it comes at a huge cost—both literal and…
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