Doctors Prefer to Die at Home

BEACON TRANSCRIPT – The latest study published in the JAMA journal of Medicine concluded that doctors prefer to die at home. It seems that the medical staff is far less inclined to resort to extreme medical procedures and prefers to spend the last days at home in peace, rather than in post-op care.

Doctors prefer to die at home, or at least 4 percent out of the general medical population. The study showed that the percentage of medically schooled patients that die in the hospital is 28 percent, as compared to the 32 percent of the normal population that do not have any connection to the medical field. Also, only 25 percent of doctors opt for surgery before dying, as opposed to 27 percent normal population. The numbers also differ when it comes to ICU admittance, doctors being present in the Intensive Care Unit in a total of 26 percent, and the general population 28 percent.

The numbers shouldn’t come as a shock, says Joel Weismann, the lead author of the cited study and deputy director and scientific officer in chief at the Boston’s Women Hospital and the Center of Public Health and Surgery at Brigham. The doctor explains that medical personnel has to deal with death on a daily basis and the perspective of facing one’s one death in the hospital is actually worse than dying. Most of the doctors prefer to die at home, surrounded by their loved ones.

Because of their profession, they know the odds better than any other patients would, they know how to make difficult decisions, to have a certain operation that could save their life, or end it. In most of the cases, they realize that the procedures they might undergo at the hospital would only prolong their imminent death, and thus make it, even more, painful so they chose to stay at home, or they refuse the extra surgery.

Another study that analyzed data from the Census Bureau of the United States came to the same conclusions as Dr. Weismann. It seems that out of a total of 411,243 patients, out of which 815 were medical doctors, and 2,635 had some sort of medical training and worked in the health profession, but were not doctors and 15.308 were people with a degree in higher education, physicians had the smallest percentage of deaths in the hospital.

According to the data that was published in JAMA, 63 percent of doctors died on hospital premises, followed by the second category, those who had medical knowledge, with 65.4 percent, people with higher education came to a total of 66 percent and the general population 72, 4 percent.

Both of studies showed evidence that doctors prefer to die at home. Maybe medical experience makes them more cynical, or maybe it brings them more to peace with the perspective.

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