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CHICAGO — There's no better time than now to talk about dying. And if the best-seller lists are any indication, it's a really hot topic these days.

You've got "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Atul Gawande, "Gratitude" by Oliver Sacks and "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi.

What these titles have in common is that they were all written by doctors — a surgeon, neurologist and a neurosurgeon, respectively. Sacks and Kalanithi wrote theirs as they were facing their own deaths.

It makes sense that medical practitioners are the ones leading the charge in talking about death — since they see it so often. And these three authors in particular are at the cutting edge of talking about the end of life and helping to facilitate discussions about how we want to die.

New research from the John A. Hartford Foundation, an organization that works to improve the health of older Americans, has set the baseline for how prepared our medical system is to meaningfully address end-of-life issues and advanced care planning. The context: Every eight seconds an adult in the U.S. turns 65.

The project is called "Conversation Stopper," a national poll of approximately 750 physicians. During a news briefing on the results, pollster Tresa Undem said "99 percent of physicians considered end-of-life conversations important, but they feel the structural barriers of not having a formal process in place for assessing patients' goals and attitudes about the end of life keeps them from doing so."

But they definitely want to. Seventy-five percent of the doctors who responded to the poll said that it is their responsibility to initiate conversations about advanced care planning with patients, with only 15 percent saying that the patient or their families should begin the dialogue.

The same number of doctors (75 percent) said that they don't feel they have enough of the right kind of training to talk to their patients about their end of life.

In addition to not having formal instruments for guiding such delicate talks, doctors also cited reasons such as fearing that their patients will think they are "giving up on them," not wanting a patient to give up hope, not being sure it's "the right time," being wary of a family-patient dynamic and, increasingly important, not being sure what's culturally appropriate for the patient.

Boy is that issue fraught with land mines.

I hate making generalizations but when it comes to Hispanics, I have to say that they are super wary of the subject. Conversations that might touch upon end-of-life wishes — even in families where relatives have suffered unnecessarily at their end — are likely to be stopped with an angry rebuke: "What, you want me dead?"

According to Anthony Back, a co-director of the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence, a co-sponsor of the poll, "Though spending your last hours with a catheter in your bladder, a tube down your nose and an IV in your arm in a bright noisy place like an intensive care unit doesn't sound appealing to many people, it's still very difficult to bring this up. And even harder when you're talking to people from different cultures.

"Different cultures deal with death very differently. Asians, for instance, don't show a lot of emotions. Other cultures generally have low medical literacy. Still others believe that even talking about death will make death happen. So the physician ends up needing even more skills in talking with these patients. And I mean skills that go above and beyond cultural competence training. Add an in-person or over-the-phone interpreter into the mix and it's a real challenge."

Yet, the very fact that best-selling books, end-of-life care legislation and Medicare reimbursement for engaging in such conversations are getting such traction — and money is being spent on learning how these important discussions can be made a standard part of medical care for everyone, not just people over 65 — indicates that we're moving in the right direction.

Maybe it's partly a branding issue. "End of life" sounds scary. Yet as we get these conversations going, we need not contemplate death so much as consider how we want to live immediately before we die.

Twitter, @estherjcepeda