How is time to death calculated in terminally I’ll patients?
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Usually it’s from experience. Doc’s have seen a lot of death and they know the physical condition of the patient. It’s usually enough to give a window. That being said, people can defy expectations on both ends.
Further, medical science being what it is, people have a lot more input into when they die than ever before. Usually in the form of discussions with families and medical professionals. People decide how much technology they want used to keep them alive and what’s too much. Often, medical science can keep a body ‘alive’ nearly indefinitely so it’s critical that people decide how far they’re willing to go before it’s too late and you lose capacity, because if you don’t decide then healthcare will default to extraordinary measures to keep you alive until someone steps in to stop it …and that’s a burden that you don’t want to push on to your loved ones. There’s a truism in healthcare that death is not always the worst outcome…
Finally, when I worked in surgical units, we had zero people die in surgery. It simply wasn’t allowed to happen. Instead, if someone wasn’t going to make it after every option was exhausted, they were transferred to intensive care and kept alive long enough for families to come say goodbye.
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