If you were critically injured or ill, how would you want to spend your final days? Death and illness are often taboo subjects in our culture, but how might we benefit from talking about them more? In our current medical culture, the old and the ill are often intubated, catheterized and even shelved away in care facilities to live out their final days alone, confused and often in pain. And while most people believe they don't need to have end of life conversations until they are old, it's a conversation we could all benefit from having earlier in life.  Join us with Dr. Jessica Zitter as we explore how to formulate our own ideas and preferences around the end of life, as well as how to have these conversations with others.

Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH, author of Extreme Measures: Finding A Better Path to the End of Life, is an expert on the medical experience of death and dying. She attended Stanford University and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and completed her residency in internal medicine at the Brigham and Woman's Hospital in Boston. She was a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Zitter is double boarded in the two specialties of pulmonary/critical care medicine and palliative care medicine – a rare combination. She writes for the New York Times, The Huffington Post, the Pacific Standard, The Atlantic, and the Journal of Palliative Medicine, and is featured in Extremis, an award-winning documentary about end-of-life decision making in an ICU.

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Anatomy of Living Podcast with Ashton Szabo

Approaching the End of Life – Conversation with Dr. Jessica Zitter [Episode 04]

Credits:

Special Guest: Dr. Jessica Zitter

www.jessicazitter.com

Producer and Host: Ashton Szabo

Sound Engineer: Zach Cooper

Intro and Outro Music: Emily Ann Peterson

Ashton Szabo

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