Our study challenges that conventional wisdom.

What this study does is beg some important questions.

The most obvious areas we want to examine are those in which there are overt moral controversies: sexual and reproductive health, end-of-life care.

The close ties between belief and behavior suggests that physicians are unlikely to reach agreement anytime soon about what is suitable.

We found no consensus among physicians about what is customary or appropriate. Despite efforts to standardize many aspects of the doctor-patient relationship, patients are likely to encounter very different approaches.

[The answer, usually, is no. Wisdom is a quality that defies easy definition but psychologists who study aging have found that some of its components - judgment, emotional regulation - do improve with age in most people, consciously or not.] Of course there is a subset of people out there who are sitting in their rocking chairs, spewing hate, but my guess is that these people weren't very pleasant to begin with, ... The reality is that the data are fairly convincing that people as they get older become more positive and less self-absorbed.