Doctor's Personal Choices

[xoxoxoBruce]

We've discussed this before but it's a good reminder to do some serious thinking and make your feelings known.

For 55 years Johns Hopkins has been sending out yearly questionnaires to it's medical graduates. Like a nagging Auntie they want to know how everyone is feeling, but unlike Auntie, they want specifics.

Members of the School of Medicine classes of 1948 through 1964, they've volunteered to keep a running medical chart of their entire lives, providing detailed annual updates, and in the process have created an extraordinary trove of medical information.

This mother lode of data has yielded some fascinating and important results over the years, including landmark studies correlating high cholesterol in early adulthood with later heart disease, as well as links between mental depression and heart attacks.

Hopkins scientists using the data were also able to show links between coffee drinking and heart disease, and youthful obesity and later diabetes.

Now doctors know the symptoms of a lot of bad things that nobody wants to consider, and it's harder for them to dismiss symptoms with some half-assed explanation. They've seen how those bad things play out, with all the variations.

So when you ask a bunch of doctors the how they want to play their last hand, you can eliminate John Wayne(whack it off, I'll bite this anvil), and Mrs Doubtfire (Oh, I don't want to be a bother, dear). Asked if they would want various interventions at the bitter end. The only intervention that doctors overwhelmingly want is pain medication.