Ask Dr. Hallberg: Documenting death a tricky task

Say someone died with pneumonia. But wait, they had a stroke before that -- and the diabetes probably contributed too.

What should the doctor record as the cause of death on the death certificate? Dr. Jon Hallberg, the regular medical analyst for All Things Considered and physician in family medicine at the University of Minnesota, told MPR News that's the biggest challenge when filling out the death certificate.

Click the audio player above to hear a conversation with Hallberg about the history of death certificates, spurred by a new article in The New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz:

Not every mystery involves a dead body, but every dead body is a mystery. Death is an assassin with infinite aliases, and the question of what kills us is tremendously complex. It is also tremendously labile. We ask it with clinical curiosity and keen it in private grief; we pose it rhetorically and inquire specifically; we address it to everyone from physicians to philosophers to priests. It is as bare as bone and as reverberant as bell metal: Why do we die?