Sadly, no 1 would like to speak about dying

Perhaps we shouldn’t worry about death. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. And given that no one, not even those professing faith in God, has any certainty about what happens when we die, of course we’re all frightened of what we cannot see: we are just like children scared of the dark. But this fear seriously affects public policy.

Last month the Court of Appeal ruled that doctors must consult patients before placing a “do not attempt resuscitation” order on their notes. This sounds sensible enough, but our attitude to death complicates that consultation.

When a medic broaches the subject, the response is, “You’re giving up on me, doctor.” Yet cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) does not often restore a patient to full life, but to a painful and undignified extended wait for death. The patient’s ribs may get broken and they can sustain hypoxic brain damage, before dying a few weeks later.

This makes neither for a good life nor a good death. Unless you have a shockable heart rhythm that responds well to CPR, your chances of long-term survival are slim. It is not something many patients would choose were they aware of the risks, but our anxiety about death makes it more difficult for doctors to communicate these facts.

The fear of the end of our lives warps other parts of our health system, too. We insult older patients stuck in hospital by calling them “bed-blockers”.

A junior doctor friend once followed two grand politicians around his hospital and watched as they jumped in a lift and missed out an entire floor. That floor contained the geriatric wards, which don’t have the photo-call appeal of a premature baby unit or oncology ward.

We take little interest in geriatric care, even though it will punctuate many of our lives. And so that area of medicine is one of the least-loved. It is the largest medical specialty, with 1,252 of the UK’s 12,221 consultant physicians. But of the 139 geriatric consultant posts advertised in 2012, only 74 were filled. Only acute medicine has a bigger struggle to recruit.

And a bias against the old trickles down, away from the definitely dying towards those who are simply, by virtue of their age, closer to death than the young. Yesterday’s Telegraph revealed that clinical commissioning groups in the NHS are denying over-75s life-saving operations, not because of complications and other conditions associated with getting on a bit, but because of the old age itself.

If we didn’t shut out death, perhaps we’d be a little more horrified by the apparent institutional bias in our health system against the old. And perhaps we could make our own deaths a little less distressing.

Sadly, no 1 would like to speak about dying