Many elderly patients suffer protracted, and expensive, deaths as health care providers pummel them with technological fixes for bodies that have already worn out. The dilemma is that while no doctor wants to give futile care that tortures more than it heals, no one also wants to be guilty of euthanasia or abandoning their patient.
A group of Roman Catholic nuns at a convent near Rochester, New York, has a new/old answer to this dilemma: Involve the patient in a warm and loving community where the patient’s wishes are always paramount, but death is faced with realism, and care goals are clarified long before any final crisis. As Jane Gross reported in a beautiful article in the New York Times:
A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death – none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care – trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
I recommend reading the entire article, which is one more example of a spirit that I have tried to imbue in my book, “The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care – and Avoiding the Worst.” When patients become actively involved in understanding their own health care, they can make decisions that best fit their own values.
