Don’t Torture Mom & Dad
A doc’s eloquent plea:
It’s typically the son or daughter who has been physically closest to an elderly parent’s pain who is the most willing to let go. Sometimes an estranged family member is “flying in next week to get all this straightened out.” This is usually the person who knows the least about her struggling parent’s health. … With unrealistic expectations of our ability to prolong life, with death as an unfamiliar and unnatural event, and without a realistic, tactile sense of how much a worn-out elderly patient is suffering, it’s easy for patients and families to keep insisting on more tests, more medications, more procedures. … When their loved one does die, family members can tell themselves, “We did everything we could for Mom.” … At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture. When a case such as this comes along, nurses, physicians and therapists sometimes feel conflicted and immoral. … A retired nurse once wrote to me: “I am so glad I don’t have to hurt old people any more.” (more; HT Amanda Budny)
Our urge to use medicine to show that we care costs more than just spending more for mostly useless treatment. It often literally tortures our loved ones.
I'm guessing that cost is not the real issue. If it were, you could appeal to insurance companies to substitute cryonics for more expensive aggressive medical treatments at the end of life. (Note for example that medication for assisted dying is a covered benefit in Oregon.) It would make good business sense, as cryonics is less expensive than pursuing aggressive treatment. However first you would need to get doctors recommending it. For that to happen, you need them either recommending it as a medical method of increasing the patient's long-term survival chances, which I see as unlikely to fly (on its own) any time soon, or recommending it as an alternative to reduce suffering and cope with anxiety about death.
That would be awesome. There's a practical barrier, though; how would the cryonic procedure get paid for? Health insurance won't cover it, and only the quite well-off would be able to afford paying for it outright instead of with a life insurance policy purchased in advance.