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Knowing How Doctors Die May Help Patients at End of Life

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Nora Zamichow says if she and her husband, Mark Saylor, had known how doctors die, they may have made different treatment decisions for him at the end of his life. (Maya Sugarman/KPCC)

Los Angeles doctor Ken Murray first started thinking about how doctors die roughly ten years ago, when a physician he knew passed away.

"He had died at home and it occurred to me I couldn’t remember any of our colleagues...who had actually died in the hospital," he says. "That struck me as quite odd because I know that most people do die in hospitals."

Murray then began talking about it with other doctors.

"And I said, 'Have you noticed this phenomenon?'" he recalls. "They thought about it and they said, 'You know? You’re right.'"

Five years later, the retired family practice physician shared his observations in an online article entitled, "How Doctors Die." It quickly went viral. In it, Murray told the world that doctors don’t typically die like the rest of us and he doesn't plan to, either.

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"I fit with the vast majority of physicians that want to have a gentle death and don’t want extraordinary measures taken when they have no meaning," he says.

Read the full story via KPCC. 

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