Physician Educates Colleagues, Patients on End-of-Life Decisions
“There are certain things that we do well in health care in this country. If you have a heart problem and you need bypass surgery, there are many places you can have that done, and it will be done well. One of the things we don’t do well is to take care of people who are dying. Most people, including myself, went into medicine to be heroes—to rescue people from the clutches of death. People who are dying… that’s not glamorous.” – Steven A. Levy, MD, Pennsylvania Medical Society member
Because end-of-life care is not intuitive to physicians, Dr. Steven Levy dedicated himself to learning about how to handle patients who are dying—a subject that was not taught when he went to medical school more than 25 years ago.
“I don’t like doing things that I don’t do well, so I learned on my own something I didn’t get in medical school and didn’t learn in residency,” Dr. Levy says.
To help spare others from having to learn about this tough subject on their own, Dr. Levy has traveled the country, lecturing on end-of-life health care decisions.
He recently sat on a six-member panel for the “It’s a Matter of Life or Death: Getting Beyond Act 169 – Pennsylvania’s New Advance Directives Law” program held in November 2007 in Erie.
“Putting doctors and lawyers together in the same room is like cats and dogs, oil and water, and all the other analogies you can think of. But this is a subject we need to talk about,” Dr. Levy says.
The program—sponsored by the Coalition of Attorneys and Physicians in Erie (CAPE)—drew approximately 100 area physicians and attorneys. Panelists discussed case studies relating to advance directives and then took questions from the audience.
“It was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. We were all pleased,” Dr. Levy says.
The event was so successful that CAPE, a collaboration of the Erie County Medical Society and Erie County Bar Association, plans to host more programs on Act 169 in the future.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society offers information on advance directives for
physicians and
patients.
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Last Updated: 8/27/2008