Profound Message About End of Life in ZDoggMD Video

ZDoggMD recently teamed up with Wake Up The Movie (Coming Fall 2016) to create this profound video talking about End of Life and important topics like advanced directives. Without further ado, check out the video below:

The stories are starting to pile up in the comments of the video on YouTube. It’s amazing to read the stories about end of life. Here’s one from an EHR doc that stood out to me:

This is genius. I’m an ER doc, and I’ve done CPR on too many people who, had they just understood, would have opted for a DNR and died in a more dignified and humane way. I am all for life-saving measures, but reality is less glamorous and less optimistic than TV makes it out to be. People with advanced illness, or even simply advanced age, should really consider what they expect from their future and weigh that against the idea of being tortured on a gurney with the small chance of survival, only to be miserable in a hospital bed with an even smaller chance of returning to a normal or even fair quality of life. At this point in my life, of course, I would opt for all life-saving measures for myself (though I would rather be dead than be chronically in a vegetative state), but at some point in life, the scales should tip. Ignoring the issue and just accepting the default potentially leads to increased sadness and anguish for yourself and your loved ones down the road.

I’ve heard some of my geriatric doctor friends comment that we need to start having more meaningful discussions about end of life. I think that’s true. It’s a challenging discussion that nobody really wants to have, but it’s an important one. I know I was brought to tears when my wife and I have sat down and talked about many of the issues related to it. It’s not an easy topic, but I’m glad we’ve had the discussion and put our desires in writing. Now we just need EHRs and PHRs to support advance directives better than most do today.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • So glad I stumbled into this here. I’d seen one of the parody videos in the past, but this one gave me chills. Well done and quite the message! Thanks for cluing me into this Wake Up thing, too!

  • There is a company out of MassChallenge called “My Exit Strategy” https://myexitstrategy.co/ that is looking to tackle this very important issue. The other thing I would like to add is that our society over the last 50 years hasn’t helped matters in this regard either. This idea of passing things on and passing on things as we get into old age has been lost. Modern medicine has allowed us to prolong life, but often times without quality or dignity. The quarter of the GDP spending on healthcare going to end-of-life care is a testament to that.

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