Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune, now in paperback with a new reading group guide Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune, now in paperback with a new reading group guide
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures-in his own practices as well as others’-as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life-all the way to the very end.
Comments are disabled for this post.
){kind=link}
This book could be a game changer This book could be a game changer, if enough people read it and take it to heart. Atul Gawande addresses end-of-life care, and how we’re getting it wrong, both within the medical establishment and in our families.Dr. Gawande’s book focuses both on medical procedures and living conditions in later life. He addresses the reality that as people near the end of life, decisions about their living situation are primarily aimed at ensuring safety at the expense of retaining autonomy,…
“The End Matters” I became a fan of Atul Gawande upon reading his first book in 2002: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. In reading many of his previous books I found he always asked questions: Why do we do things; for what purpose; is this working to achieve the best results for the patient in his physical and cultural circumstance? Gawande tackles the dilemmas of medical ethics by approaching them with sagacious common-sense. I think most of his books should be required reading in…
The Old and Sick Are Not Children This is a timely book for me because my parents are very elderly (94 and 88) and determined to stay in their home until the last possible second. After reading this thought provoking book that teaches so much I am thinking that it may be possible for them to stay until the end which could be next week or a few years from now. It’s going to take some organizing, but it looks like it is worth some research and time. It makes me sad to see how much of their independence they have lost, but they…