>Death is a very personal thing. Would you tell the author of TFA that they are "giving up?"

Tell it to them? No. When the treatment effort starts, you make it clear that they can drop off the therapy at any time they want. When and if that happens you sugar coat it as much as you can and help them make peace with the world and their families etc. At that point no benefit will come to the patient from telling them the truth.

But it totally matters when discussing e.g. health policies or future directions of treatments. These people do actually give up and we should face that. We should ask what parts of our current treatment methods are the most unbearable and how we can improve those in the future. How to better approach the patients from the beginning. Things like that.