Maggie's Farm

Physicians, like clergy, are more comfortable with terminal illness and death than others. Routine proximity to death and dying makes it feel natural and normal instead of a great enemy. From the WSJ's Why Doctors Die Differently - Careers in medicine have taught them the limits of treatment and the need to plan for the end:

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life.

What's unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again.

It's a rare doc who elects heroic and torturous treatments for his own terminal ailment.