How Medicine Avoids Mortality
Modern medicine is built to fix, rescue, and prolong life. Doctors are trained to solve problems, and that training can make death feel like a professional failure instead of a natural part of life. As a result, many people reach the end of life surrounded by treatments and machines, even when those measures can no longer restore a life they would want to live.
This problem becomes clear in the case of Joseph Lazaroff, a man with terminal cancer. His doctors focused on whether surgery could stabilize his spine, not on whether the operation would lead to the kind of ending he wanted. The procedure worked in a narrow medical sense, but it led to pain, dependence, and an institutional death far from the life he hoped to preserve. Medicine answered the technical question and missed the human one.
Over time, aging and dying have moved from the home to hospitals and care facilities. That change brought real benefits, including better treatment for infections, injuries, and many diseases. But it also gave medicine more control over a part of life it does not fully know how to handle. When doctors treat mortality as just another medical problem, they can lose sight of comfort, meaning, and dignity.
The deeper issue is that serious illness exposes the limits of medicine. For clinicians who are used to acting, those limits are hard to accept. So they often continue to offer more procedures, more drugs, and more chances, even when the likely result is more suffering. A more humane approach begins when care is no longer judged only by how long life is extended, but by whether life remains worth living.
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