Risk, life extension and the pursuit of medical possibility

Abstract

With increasing frequency, the oldest members of US society are undergoing medical interventions aimed at prolonging life. Using cardiac care as a case study, this paper explores how a discourse of risk infuses and legitimates high-tech clinical treatments in late life. In particular, we examine how the diminishing risks associated with biomedical procedures produce a sense of medical possibility regarding life extension, and push the definition of 'old age' into a receding future. Simultaneously, physicians, patients and families come to understand the management and reduction of future cardiac risks to be germane for individuals even near the end of life. Driven by the logic and language of risk, decisions to intervene are experienced as incremental and largely unremarkable, and the pursuit of an open-ended future via biomedical means is perceived as an ethical imperative, trumping deliberation or discussion of the utility of intervention and the ultimate ends being pursued. For practitioners and patients alike, the engagement of risk, the preservation of hope it facilitates and the routinisation of intervention it produces all contribute to the emerging mandate to treat at ever-older ages. © 2006 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.