Stewart Brand Is 81—and He Doesn’t Want to Go on a Ventilator | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/stewart-brand-ventilator-end-of-life-care
Un article émouvant sur l’intubation et le choix d’une personne vivante envers ce traitement. Par Steven Levy (l’historien des Hackers) à propos de Stewart Brand.
Brand is a legendary writer and thinker, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of the Long Now Foundation. He is also 81, and his tweet was a way of opening a conversation on a subject that was impossible for him to avoid during the Covid-19 pandemic: When is it time to say no to treatment?
This end-of-life question didn’t arrive with the new coronavirus. For people who are older or have serious medical conditions, the possibility of having to make frightening health decisions in an emergency always lurks in the back of the mind. Covid-19 drives those dark thoughts to the foreground. While the virus is still a mystery in many ways, experts have been consistent on at least one point: It hits older people and those with preexisting medical conditions the hardest. And one of the worst complications—acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—can come on suddenly, rapidly accelerating to the point where treatment dictates admission to an intensive care unit.
Brand now was posing a question: Should you just not go there? That’s when he opened it up to Twitter. “The main thing I’m looking for is data,” he wrote. “Anecdotes. Statistics. Video. INFORMATION … The stuff that good decisions are made of.”