"Leading medical textbooks 'provide little information that would help a physician care for a dying patient," according to a review by researchers from George Washington University.

"For the common causes of death that we investigated," the researchers concluded, "we found that physicians cannot turn to general medical textbooks for guidance about advanced care planning, decision making, the effect of death and dying on a patient's family, or symptom management."

Frankness about death was "strikingly absent" from the textbooks. The researchers found. What little information was included, they said, tended to be vague, unhelpful and filled with euphemisms, such as referring to dead people as "nonsurvivors."

The textbook review was conducted by researchers from George Washing-ton's Center to Improve Care of the Dying. Their results are in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

"It is no wonder that doctors so often fail their dying patients," said Joanne Lynn, director of the center and coauthor of the study. "We have not focused research or education efforts on these issues, and even our standard textbooks ignore the subject."

• Don Colburn, "News and Notes," The Washington Post, Health Section, Jan. 5, 1999

"We are told that every 17 minutes, someone in America commits suicide. In North America, suicide is the third-leading cause of death among people 15-25 years old, college students for the great part. An note this tragic feature of American life: among children between 5 and 14 years of age, suicide is the sixth most common cause of death.

"The heart asks: Why? But the answer is blowing in the wind. Young people kill themselves mainly for one reason: they cannot believe their lives are precious enough to make them worth living. Despair, depression, hopelessness, self-loathing--these are the killers. I believe that, as Christians, we should worry less about whether Christians who have killed themselves go to heaven, and worry more about how we can help people like them find hope and joy in living."

• Lewis B. Smedes, writing on "Is Suicide Unforgivable?" in Christianity Today, July 10, 2000.

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