Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in STAT “Why do they have that cold steel on my son’s ankle?” The father of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was newly paralyzed from the waist down, wanted to know why his son was shackled to his hospital bed. Jacob Blake had been shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, Wis., [...]
Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in The New York Times In March 2019, a robot entered a patient’s room in California and a doctor on its screen told him and his granddaughter that he was dying. This experience, posted to the granddaughter’s Facebook page, was treated as a scandal. Newscasters questioned the humanity of a health care system that would do [...]
Click to listen article by Ariella Markowitz Dr. Jessica Zitter specializes in critical and palliative care medicine and practices at Highland Hospital in Oakland, where she helps people with serious illness talk about how they want to live, all the way to the end. Zitter says those are conversations we all should be having with our loved ones [...]
Dr. Zitter talks on NPR's Life Kit podcast about the importance of Advance Care Planning. Click to listen
My friend Jim called me with urgency in his voice; his elderly father, living alone in New York City during the peak of the pandemic, had a multiday fever and was losing weight. He wanted to know, should he take him to the hospital? My typical response in this case — sudden illness in an otherwise healthy person — would [...]
Dr. Jessica Zitter, a critical and palliative care specialist takes listener questions about advanced directives that doctors follow in critical situations. Click to listen
By Jessica Nutik Zitter, M.D. April 16, 2020 My phone rang with a FaceTime video, and my cousin’s face popped into view. We spent the first few minutes expressing our mutual disbelief and shock over Covid-19, acknowledging the insanity and underlying terror of these unprecedented circumstances. We joked about how our anxious mothers, with their endless reminders of dressing warm and [...]
Click to listen When Dr. Steve Pantilat asks his patients what they want most at the end of life, the answer is almost always the same: To be comfortable and surrounded by people they love. “I've been in rooms where there are 35 family members, people are playing music and holding a vigil, saying prayers and singing,” said Pantilat, [...]
Click to listen When Grace Taylor was in her first year of medical school, she took an ethics class with this hypothetical: You have two ventilators and three patients who need them. Who gets one? “I remember thinking that was a classroom situation that would never come up in the real world,” says Taylor, who is now a third-year [...]
“Extremis” is a powerful tool for both personal reflection and cultural transformation. Organizations across the country have invited Dr. Zitter to introduce the film and follow the screening with a Q and A. These events invite the audience, whether patients, physicians, families, or healthcare professionals, to take a step back and ask: What do we really want for ourselves, our [...]
