BROADCASTS.com

How do people react when they hear they have a serious illness?\xa0 Shock, \u201clike a car is rushing straight at me\u201d (says Bill Gardner on our podcast).\xa0 After the shock?\xa0 Many people strive, struggle, crawl even back toward a \u201cnormal\u201d life.\xa0 And some people, in addition or instead, engage in deep introspection on how to make meaning or live with or understand this experience of serious illness.\xa0

Today we talk with deep thinkers about this issue.\xa0 Bill Gardner is a psychologist living with advanced cancer who blogs \u201cI have serious news,\u201d Brad Stuart is an internist and former hospice director whose book is titled, \u201cFacing Death: Spirituality, Science, and Surrender at the End of Life,\u201d and Juliet Jacobson is a palliative care doc who wrote a paper finding that geriatricians do NOT consider aging a serious illness. \xa0 We have a wide ranging conversation that touches on how to place aging, disability, and multimorbidity in the context of serious illness conversations, \u201cstriving toward normal,\u201d stoicism, existentialism, psychedelics, the goals of medicine, medical aid in dying and more.\xa0 We could have talked for hours! And I get to play a Bob Dylan song that\u2019s been on my bucket list to learn.

Enjoy!

-@AlexSmithMD

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Additional links:

Bill Gardner\u2019s article about MAID in Comment Magazine
https://comment.org/death-by-referral/

Bill Gardner\u2019s articles about living with terminal cancer in Mockingbird Magazine: https://mbird.com/art/cancer-in-advent/
https://mbird.com/religion/testimony/in-the-electors-school/

Brad Stuat\u2019s website:
https://bradstuartmd.com

Juliet mentioned:
On existential threat and terror management:
The Worm at the Core: On the role of death in life by Soloman, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski

On how existential threat is stored in the brain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31401240/

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Papers on \u201cstriving toward normalcy\u201d in the setting of serious illness
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36893571/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35729779/

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