Quote Originally Posted by shootingstar View Post
I think you know it doesn't serve alot of great purpose to buttonhole a person with a terminal disease to say that they will suffer alot when the patient is already /has been trying to live healthy all along.
That wasn't my point (although I think it's important to acknowledge that healthy living isn't a magical amulet against suffering).

I don't want to belabor this excessively, but these two articles say a lot - the first one, both in what it says and in what it leaves unsaid; the second one, on that increasingly popular theme of a doctor who has to face the reality of what his profession is doing to its patients, and is horrified by it.

It really reinforces my impression that in modern American society, a vanishingly small number of people are willing to take responsibility for their own mortality. They just wait passively for it to happen to them ... or spend prodigious physical, emotional, family and financial resources on the assumption that if they only spend enough, it never will. I find that both sad and terribly frustrating.