Dr. Richard Coker

speaker

121 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Dr. Richard Coker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Pat Kenny Show · Dr. Richard Coker, Author of Timor Mortis · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

we seem to give a great deal of emphasis to autonomy and the competence and capacity of patients when they're in terminal decline.

And yet, when they are actually completely infirm and incapable of making decisions, either because they've got something like a terrible respiratory disease, which I described in the book, or something like locked-in syndrome, which is where you can barely communicate because you're

all your neurological processes have basically closed down.

In a sense, we remove from those at the very end of suffering, at the far reaches of those who are most suffering, we sometimes remove the capacity for them to make a decision.

And that's something that I've been disturbed by and tried to address in the book, that we should be having conversations about death and dying much more openly, not just doctors, but everybody.

Yes.

I mean, in fact, some definitions of death rely on technological measurements.

I mean, death is complicated and it isn't just a technical issue.

I think what you're alluding to there may be that we're seeing such a change in the last...

50 years or so, and certainly over the last century and a half of increasing longevity, a move to technological excellence, amazing technologies, a shift to dying in hospital, you know, with bleeps and surrounded by people you don't really know.

And at the same time, we've got a transformation in the media.

So you've got a sort of familiarization at a distance with some people's, particularly some celebrities deaths, but actually a familiarity with real dying, which is, you know, is lost.

I mean, my mother is 97.

I was talking to her about how many people she's seen die and she's seen one.

And that was my father.

I must have seen hundreds.

You know, she's lived a long time.

I was a little surprised.

I sometimes worry that the advances of medicine sometimes lead us to think that maybe it can do more than it really can.

It can't avoid death.

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