On Ending Well | Shoshana Ungerleider, MD

Jan 3, 2023

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Too often, modern medicine focuses on life-extending interventions for those nearing the end of life at the expense of quality of life. Our guest today, Shoshana Ungerleider, MD, argues we urgently need to rethink the emphasis of end-of-life care. She's the founder of the End Well Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to improve how doctors and patients approach issues of mortality, as well as an executive producer of the 2018 film End Game and a major funder of the 2016 film Extremis, two Academy Award-nominated short documentaries on end-of-life care. As a health communicator. Dr. Ungerleider is the host of the TED Health Podcast and has been featured as a medical expert on CNN, CBS, PBS, Fox News, and other news networks. In this episode, she discusses her journey in health care and shares her mission to transform the end of life experience of patients everywhere and make dying well a part of living well.

In this episode, you will hear about:

How Dr. Ungerleider found her way to a career in health care and how she pushed through imposter syndrome while in medical school - 2:23
Dr. Ungerleider’s formative experiences working with elderly patients in the ICU, leading her question the practices of modern medicine when dealing with seriously ill patients - 10:18
How the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted public consciousness around death and dying - 15:30
The origins of End Well, the conference and organization founded by Dr. Ungerleider and her colleagues in 2017 - 23:51
What it would look like for there to be a shift in the cultural conversation around death and dying - 30:31
A reflection on the risks of romanticizing the dying process - 36:54
The recent cancer diagnosis in Dr. Ungerleider’s family and how this has propelled her to proactively manage her own risks - 43:49
Advice for new clinicians on dealing with patient deaths - 48:49

Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider is the author of “My Dad’s Terminal Cancer Diagnosis May Have Saved My Life” for Newsweek.

You can follow Dr. Ungerleider on Twitter @ShoshUMD

In this episode, we discussed The Good Place, an award-winning sitcom series about philosophy and the afterlife.

We discussed several articles and studies about whether physicians are more likely to choose to die at home than the general public. These articles include “How Doctors Die” by Ken Murray, “Association of Occupation as a Physician With Likelihood of Dying in a Hospital” by Blecker, Johnson, Altekruse, et al. and “Patients, and Doctors, Aren’t Dying at Home” by Dr. Danielle Ofri (our guest on episode 35).

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