1、TED演讲 让我们来谈谈死亡Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, (Laughter) So - (Laughter)So with that in mind, Im going to set about trying to do those things here,
2、and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think youre immortal, on surveys, but - (Laug
3、hter) Unfortunately, that isnt going to happen.TED演讲英语:让我们来谈谈死亡While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in
4、the piece.Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from its going to happen to everybody, is its shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that its currentl
5、y on.So there you go. Thats the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now lets see whether we can set you free. I dont promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think Ive kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. Its been a ride, man. This has
6、been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. Theres many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time Ive worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something t
7、o do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like lifesaving. I really apologize to everybody for doing that, becaus
8、e obviously, we dont. What we do is prolong peoples lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we cant, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.And whats really happened over the period of time that Ive been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we starte
9、d saving back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.So whats happening now is theres been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what theyre dying of now isnt as amenable to what
10、 we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the 80s and 90s.So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we havent really squared with you guys about whats really happening now, and its about time we did. I kind of woke up to this bit in the late 90s when I met this guy. This
11、guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. I was called down to the ward to see him. His is the little hand. I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. He said, Look, theres a guy down here. Hes got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. His daugh
12、ters here and she wants everything possible to be done. Which is a familiar phrase to us. So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. You can see his bones through the skin. Hes very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and hes too sick to talk t
13、o me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation? And she looked at me and said,No, of course not! I thought, Okay. Take this steady. And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to
14、me, You know, we always thought thered be time.Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasnt happening here. There wasnt this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in
15、Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. One in a hundred. And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large.Now, I work in acute care. This is John Hunter Hospital. And I thought,