In your final years, do you want your doctor to talk to you about death? Here’s how it can help | Kathryn Mannix

Patients may not perceive that they are becoming so sick that death is increasingly likely. Families demand that medics “do everything!” Doctors seem reluctant to discuss mortality and how best to serve this very sick person, diverting instead to unnecessary tests or unwarranted trials of ineffective treatment, to escalating and intrusive interventions, to the farcical pretence that this terminally ill human might just survive if we can find a cure for their latest medical complication. Just don’t mention dying.