Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Book details
Summary
Description
In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.
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This book was definitely worth the time to read . The book was clearly written, easy to read, and discussed many real life situations and cases. Our medical system currently believes in keeping patients alive, not always considering the quality of the patient's life. He discusses how this decision is not always the best choice for a patient and how many doctors have a very difficult time discussing the possible negatives.
I’ve read it 7 times. Learn more every time. Low key stories of real people guide the car process of how to live at advancing age. Pitfalls and people, creative people, finding solutions. I’ve been watching 75 years or so. Doug C, MD