Health

As someone who has completed hundreds of death certificates over the course of my career, I've always felt that there should be a diagnosis code for "got old and just died", which is what I saw in my internal medicine practice. In our country, we are blessed to have an imperfect but sometimes serviceable system of late life health care. We keep the old folks alive in the face of serious infections, complications of falls and fractures, strokes, and assorted cardiac maladies. Most of those deaths in the elderly, when they finally occur, are attributed to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.