Palliative care

I recently read a really fascinating post on the British Medical Journal site: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/11/12/is-palliative-care-having-an-existential-crisis/

This post begins with a concept first discussed in another journal, The Lancet, entitled With the End in Mind and a discussion of the perceived 'chronic niceness' of palliative care. But like any other field, the myth of palliative care professionals being of some kind of one-note niceness is debunked. 

The article also explores the gender imbalance in physicians who choose the speciality - a really interesting avenue of thought that I won't get into here, but a conversation that definitely needs to be further explored. 

But.. the phrase that got me was this: I think that our death anxiety is what has led to a desire for palliative care to take over all of dying and make it invisible. 

Really, I couldn't agree more. What we want, more than anything else, is a solution. What we want is someone we can make responsible for our 'good death'. We want it to be someone else's responsibility. We want it taken care of... gone.