End-of-life care in America is broken at every level
Like most doctors, I was a young resident, fresh out of medical school, when I had my first experience with the American way of mistreating the dying.
Taras Skripchenko was a frail, bed-bound 78-year-old man with inoperable lung cancer who was admitted to my service during my first year of residency training. Skripchenko was too confused to have a lucid conversation and lacked family members to guide his decision-making. His oncologists hadn’t …