[shimon]

Patients also often want more stuff to be done. Humans evaluate treatment decisions as "let's keep trying vs. give up" not "I'd take on a 5% risk of complications for a 20% better chance of living another 3 months".

The complexity of these tradeoffs means that unusual choices are really hard to make well. This is most obvious in the expensive treatments that are sometimes applied before a patient's death -- expensive both in cost to deliver and harm to the patient's remaining days.