Dr Kathryn Mannix is a Palliative Care consultant based at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Newcastle, who began the UK’s first dedicated palliative care CBT clinic.
‘We’re all going to die!’
No, not a scary action movie, but life. We have been dying for millennia and notwithstanding medical advances, the death rate remains 100%. And yet, despite so many opportunities to study the phenomena around dying, most doctors are unable to describe the process that takes people out of the world.
What a contrast with the processes of pregnancy and birth, to which magazines, shops and websites are dedicated; lessons are delivered in schools; couples are invited for ‘birth practice’ sessions as the due date approaches… Perhaps not all of these analogies are directly transferable to the process of dying, especially as 50% of candidates will expire suddenly, but dying is a recognisable process and modern medicine has largely forgotten it in the rush to postpone it.
British Geriatrics Society 