Today at a local Compassion & Choices chapter meeting we, refreshingly, heard from a Catholic Father who’s worked as a medical chaplain for many years, including at my local county hospital system. He supports Oregon-style physician aided death, as he prefers to call it—the kind of system intended to offer an option for the brutally […]
In December 2013 I attended my first Lown Institute conference. That theme was From Avoidable Care to Right Care. Even though I knew that the group embraced “slow medicine” values, I didn’t really get their essence until hearing Dr. Bernard Lown’s keynote in which this now-frail, iconic man (who reminded me in several ways of my […]
This blog post is a place for listeners of the Thursday January 15 2015 End-of-Life University interview to engage further with me and one another. Feel free to post questions and comments here. Bart Windrum .
Welcome, Overcoming the 7 Deadly Obstacles to Dying in Peace webinar participants. Thank you for the opportunity to share my end-of-life worldview and work with you. This post’s sole purpose is to serve as a discussion forum for webinar participants. Feel free to post questions and comments, for me or one another, below. Blog comments are moderated, by […]
On Thursday 22 May 2014 from 7–9pm Denver Colorado USA’s Mercury Cafe will host a unique evening. At Choosing How to Die I’ll present a concise introduction to Overcoming the 7 Deadly Obstacles to Dying in Peace, identifying the obstacles (the first step to assessing, mitigating, and overcoming them). We’ll show Terry Pratchett’s documentary Choosing to Die, […]
Tonight was the second session (of ten overall) of the Boulder Fire Department Citizen Academy. The police department has run a similar program for some time; this is the fire department’s inaugural. About three dozen vetted citizens are receiving a pumper fleet’s worth of information from a range of folks including the department’s highest echelons. Tonight […]
e-Patient Dave deBronkart just published a guest post at his blog regarding whether the term “e-patient” has run its useful course and is an inaccurate descriptor because it continues and reinforces the mindset of people needing medical treatment (I use “treatment”, not “care”) as conditions rather than persons. Finding right language can be crazymaking. Especially […]
For 2-1/2 days in early December 2013 in Boston, MA about 350 people (roughly 90% medical providers and 10% citizens) convened to ponder the problems of medical overuse, underuse, and misuse; From Avoidable Care to Right Care. This lay person end-of-life reform advocate attended on scholarship. The Institute made an investment in me as a […]
Today is a little milestone: my first (and thus far only) TEDx talk—Dying IN Peace to Die AT Peace: New Terms of Engagement—has been accessed 1,000 times. Small by internet standards; a mold spore as compared to a virus. Yet 1,000 people is still a sizable number of people to touch. I had hoped for […]
Haphazard Encounters of the Last Kind (Why Everyone Hates the Thought of Dying) One sentence abstract: Just as price transparency is required for a financially equitable and true marketplace, treatment orientation transparency is required for just and peaceful dying. Since 2004–05 as a result of my parents’ three-week terminal hospitalizations (Mom’s, comatose and intubated in […]
