When the press and marketing people talk about “Saving Lives” it’s a bit misleading really. You can only prolongs someone’s life for a certain time – perhaps not very long – rather than permanently saving it – as this phrase (at least to me) implies.
The reason this bothers me is that
1. It reinforces people’s denial of death, which in the end is bad for everyone.
2. It makes an artificial division between people who are terminally ill, die young etc… and people who die later on in life. People are afraid of terminally ill people for example because they remind them of their own mortality but they don’t want to be reminded.