End of life: what physicians say, in their own words

Kevin Pho, MD
September 5, 2026.

“This page is a maintained record of what physicians have written about dying, hospice, palliative care, and the decisions at the end of life on KevinMD.com, a physician-authored publication founded in 2004 by Kevin Pho, MD, a board-certified internal medicine physician in Nashua, New Hampshire. It draws on 508 essays and podcast transcripts with end of life, hospice, palliative, dying, DNR, code status, advance directive, or assisted dying in the title, published between September 2004 and August 2026 by 268 named contributors, 291 of the posts bylined by physicians, with the rest by nurses, chaplains, patients, and family members. Every claim on this page is attributed to a named author with the date it was published and a link to the original.

Read together, the essays are the profession writing about the part of its work it was not trained for. The recurring subjects are the conversation physicians avoid and patients wait for, hospice used in the last days rather than the last months, the code status decided in the emergency department at three in the morning, and the difference between a directive on paper and what happens in the room. Physicians disagree sharply about one thing, whether they should help a patient die, and the record holds both sides in equal measure. The essays that are most KevinMD’s own are the ones no journal would publish: a physician describing the patient who died, and what that patient taught them.”

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