The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.

When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.