Resisting the blame game: visualizing the high cost of dying and accepting the duty of technology stewardship for all patient populations. A review

This article explores the concepts of therapy withholding and withdrawal as expressions of technology stewardship. With the worldʹs geriatric population growing sharply, and advances in medical technology announced almost weekly, the time is ripe for the application of technology stewardship to patients of all ages, rather than arbitrary allocation limits for older persons. In life and in death, health care costs are expensive, and while society often views older people as too expensive to take care of alive, their death can be even more costly. For patients of all ages, death under the influence of technology is more expensive than life, yet it is geriatric intensive care medicine that grabs societyʹs economic attention. While possibly not the financial bargain that arbitrary allocation limits have been proposed to be, technology stewardship fosters beneficence and autonomy as human values instead of mere variables subservient to economics.