No one wants to get cancer. If someone gets it, how do they handle treatment? How do they face their own imminent death?
A recent study about End of Life Care (EOL) for people with terminal cancer produced some interesting results that I had to share with you.
Link Between Religious Coping And Aggressive Treatment In Terminally Ill Cancer Patients
"Recent research has shown that religion and spirituality are major sources of comfort and support for patients confronting advanced disease. We focused specifically on positive religious coping, on people who rely on their faith to handle the stresses of serious illness and approaching death. Our findings indicate that patients who turn to religion to cope in times of crisis, such as when facing death, are more likely to receive aggressive care when they die."
The study involved 345 advanced cancer patients at seven hospital and cancer centers around the country.
An analysis of the data showed that patients identified as positive religious copers had nearly three times the odds of receiving life-prolonging care, in the form of being on a ventilator or receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation, in the final week of life. Even after researchers accounted for the influence of important factors such as age, ethnicity, or other coping techniques, the connection between religious coping and aggressive EOL care held up.
The researchers also found that religious copers in the study were less likely to have completed advance medical directives, such as a living will or do-not-resuscitate order, which can limit the extent of such interventions in advance. The effects of religious coping on the use of intensive medical care in the last week of life remained significant even after adjusting for differences in advance care planning.
Wow. So, if you're deeply religious, you go to great lengths, even if it reduces the quality of your remaining hours and days, just to stay alive. How bizarre. Shouldn't you be happy and eager to die and be on your way to heaven? Why cling to life in your hospital bed, tied up to tubes and machines, just to be not dead for another week?
I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM (Scanning Electron Micrograph), and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they'll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.
