TED演講英語:讓我們來談談死亡

我們無法控制死亡的到來,但也許我們可以選擇用何種態度來面對它。特護專家Peter Saul博士希望通過演講幫助人們弄清臨終者真正的意願,並選擇適當的方式去面對。"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."以下是小編給大家整理的TED演講英語:讓我們來談談死亡,希望能幫到你!

TED演講:讓我們來談談死亡

Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." (Laughter) So -- (Laughter)

So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but -- (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.

TED演講英語:讓我們來談談死亡

While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.

Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on.

So there you go. That's the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. There's many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.

So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like "lifesaving." I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.

And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.