My lede:

Three studies published in March highlighted the importance of improving physicians’ conversations with dying patients.

Previous studies have shown that the 5% of Medicare patients who die each year account for 30% of Medicare’s costs, with 78% of last-year-of-life expenses occurring in the month before death. But there may be a way to help reduce these costs, according a March 9 Archives of Internal Medicine study of 603 dying cancer patients at seven hospitals, oncology clinics and hospices.

The study found that patients who had conversations with their doctors about whether to focus on life extension or pain relief were more likely to die at home and spent less time in intensive care units, undergoing chemotherapy or on ventilators. Patients benefiting from talks with their doctors had a slightly better quality of life and survived just as long as those who did not have end-of-life-care discussions with physicians.

The whole shebang.

My latest story is a feature on the book, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell,” about the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision that sanctioned sterilization of the so-called feebleminded.  The article includes three short book excerpts, a Q&A with the author and a slideshow.

The lede:

This first excerpt shows the flimsiness of the trial evidence that purported to prove the “feeblemindedness” of three generations of Bucks — grandmother Emma, daughter Carrie and infant granddaughter Vivian. It is what was used to justify sterilizing Carrie under Virginia’s eugenics law.

Red Cross nurse Caroline Wilhelm was new to Charlottesville, having moved to town the previous February to become county administrator of public welfare. She had little firsthand experience with Carrie apart from bringing her to Lynchburg on the train early in the summer. Her first comments clearly revealed the real reason that Carrie was sent to the Virginia Colony. Wilhelm explained that Mr. Dobbs [Carrie’s foster father] had reported to the welfare office that Carrie was pregnant and that “he wanted her committed somewhere — to have her sent to some institution.”

The whole shebang. Here is a 2007 story I wrote about the centennial of Indiana’s enactment of the world’s first eugenic sterilization law.