One of America's leading doctors
shocked the world
when at age
57, he announced
he only wanted to live to 75.
As he gets closer to that age,
is he sticking to his plan?
In the October 2014 Atlantic article
Why I Hope to Die at 75, Dr.
Ezekiel Emanuel
vowed that when he hit that age,
his approach to his health care
will completely change
that while he won't
actively end his life,
he wouldn't try to prolong it.
He cited statistics
on how America
is living longer
and why that wasn't
necessarily a good thing.
In 1900,
the life expectancy of an average
American was approximately 47 years.
By 1990, it was over 75.
Since his article appeared,
the number peaked in 2019 at nearly 79.
But due in part to COVID 19,
it most recently was measured
at around 76 and a half. Dr.
Emanuel also showed this sobering chart
about how creative
productivity falls off
a cliff after one's early sixties.
He points out that when parents
routinely live to 95,
children must care
take into their own retirement.
However, now it's more than eight years
later and he's 65
and looking pretty good by the way.
So how's he feeling about all of this?
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel joins me now.
He's an oncologist,
bioethicist,
a senior fellow at the Center
for American Progress.
Also vice provost for global initiatives
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Welcome back.
Your title was Why I Hope to Die at 75.
But really, what you were writing about
was quality of life, not just longevity.
Right.
Yes.
And your audience should remember that
authors do not give their articles,
titles, editors do.
And editors have an interest
in pumping up
sales, not necessarily
in being totally accurate.
Yeah. Look at 75.
It's not a matter of
do I want medical interventions
if I happen to be skiing or something,
I would definitely take
medical interventions.
If I say broke my hip or injured
my knee, that's definitely the case.
And if I'm in serious pain,
I would take pain medications
The thing I was saying
is that what I don't want to do is say
take chemotherapy
if I got cancer at that point.
And those are important distinctions.
I'm not saying stop medical care,
which is what that
title and a lot of the language around
this. Okay.
But Dr.
Emanuel, there
there are a lot of interventions.
I'm going to put them on the screen
that you say
when you hit 75,
you're no longer
interested in
regular preventive tests, screenings,
interventions, colon, icecaps
and other cancer screening tests,
cardiac stress
test, pacemaker, implantable
defibrillator, heart
valve replacement or bypass surgery,
flu shots or antibiotics.
Ventilators, dialysis,
surgery, medication.
God forbid if you get cancer,
you're just going to let it ride
Yes, sir.
And you know what?
You know, Michael,
a lot of those interventions,
they're not necessarily
pleasant interventions,
especially cancer, chemotherapy.
I'm an oncologist, as you mentioned,
and I know a lot about them.
And I think
the real question is not at that moment.
The real question is,
how do you want to live your life?
What is quality of life mean to you?
And, you know, I'm pretty clear
about what it means to me.
And the reason I wrote that
article was to suggest
that people need to be clear
about what it means to them.
I wasn't telling everyone
to do what I do.
I said, you need to think about it.
You just can't sort of blindly
go into old age,
which I think
unfortunately happens to many,
many people.
And the medical system will do
what the medical system does,
regardless of what
your philosophy of life is.
And what I was urging
people think about
what's important to you.
You know, what's important to me
is to be mentally active,
mentally engaged,
doing what
I can do
to make the world a better place.
I want to be physically calm
and you wait I want to be with Dr.
Emanuel.
Yeah.
Your father your father lived to 92.
I think your mother is still with us.
You were dealt a really good hand.
You're still taking the under
And look, you're exactly right, Michael.
I may turn out to be
what I call in the article, an outlier.
Right.
I was talking about, on average,
just because
not everyone can be an outlier,
almost all of us will be outliers.
But by definition, that's not true.
On average, there's a problem.
And let me point out a statistic.
You mentioned at the top
that our average life
expectancy is going down.
What that really means
is that a lot of young
people are not living to 75.
That's the real tragedy
that our system has not made
everyone be able
to live a healthy life to 75.
That's what we should be aiming for.
Living to a hundred or living to 90.
You know,
those extra years,
they're not in your thirties or forties,
they're in your nineties.
And that's
not necessarily where people anticipate
that extra year or month
or whatever it's going to be.
And I'm pretty clear in my own mind
about the fact
that I want to be vigorous until the end.
And that's what's important to me,
that the end is 75 or 80 or whatever
it's going to be.
I think the tragedy is
we have too many Americans
not making it to 75.
As you draw closer to 75,
is the Emanuel
clan lobbying
putting pressure on you to reconsider?
Look, I have I've had discussions
with my partner extensively about this.
If I'm
an outlier, as I think
I've said in public before.
If I'm vigorous,
I like Tony Foushee still being active,
still making major contributions
into my eighties.
You know that I'll have to reconsider.
And I fully aware of that.
I said that in the article
that 75 was a sort of average age.
It's not what I mean.
What's important
is the quality that at that point
when you hit 90
I want to book the interview,
God willing,
that I'm able to pull it off myself.
Okay.
So can we,
can we put that in the date book
right now?
I'll be a law.
I would be an amazing outlier
if that were true.
Michael, you know, there are outliers.
I just put up a Coursera
course on Ben Franklin.
He was an outlier way back in the 1700s
where at when he was, I think 82.
He participated
in the Constitution convention
gave a very very famous and a speech
at the
end of the Constitutional Convention
that's worth looking at.
He wrote part of his autobiography
at the end.
He was very vigorous
all the way until 84 when he died.
You know
God willing I should be like that.
Dr.
Emanuel, thank you.
I wish you good health
Take care. Nice to be with you.