Marcia Angell Quotes

I believe we should support people to live, and I am therefore in favour of good quality palliative care.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out of the water.

We could keep his body going, but it was trying its hardest to die.

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

Life is an incurable condition: the only known treatment is to try to keep the patient comfortable.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.

People always say things like, Oh, well, he was suffering so much that he was better off dying. But that's not true. You're always better off living.

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing.

Death is not treatment, even if it's medically facilitated.

Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.

If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for your loved one.

Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.

Wait for them to die

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.