|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Religious People Work Harder to Stall Death
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Issue
|
| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Mar 25, 2009 04:20pm |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | General |
| News Date | Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:15:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | When you're near death, how hard do you want doctors to work on keeping you alive? Would you want cardiopulmonary resuscitation in what might be your final days of a cancer death sentence? Is a ventilator the right way to go?
Researchers recently posed these sorts of questions to 345 advanced cancer patients at seven hospital and cancer centers around the United States, and the results were starkly different for the very religious and the not so.
You might think religious people would be most comfortable with the idea of death or at least the most ready to pass on. That would not exactly be right. The patients identied as positive religious copers — those who relied on faith to handle death and other trying times — were almost three times as likely to seek and receive life-prolonging care such as ventilators.
These religious copers were also less likely to have completed advance medical directives, such as living wills or do-not-resuscitate orders that would limit the potential intervention near the end.
The findings were published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
|
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
