Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Ratings134
Average rating4.5
In Being Mortal, 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.
Tags
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Being Mortal is a thought-provoking book by a physician about health care professionals (primarily doctors) and the way they treat (or mistreat, depending on your point of view) humans at the end of their lives. Atul Gwande did a lot of research, interviewing patients and family members as well as health care professionals and reviewing alternatives to nursing home care. It's obvious that he doesn't have the answers but he gave voice to those who are (or have been) in the fight and are the experts in end of life care. As Dr. Gawande states, “It's not death the very old tell me they fear, it is what happens short of death”.
This is a really beautiful, sorrowful book. I have lost both of my parents and so much of what is described here takes me back to those moments. The pleading of my dad that he never be put in a home. The exhaustion of taking care of my mother during her cancer. The despair of dealing with doctors who withheld information because they felt they knew best. Not knowing what the next day would bring. That was always the hardest thing. You never know, you simply endure. I'd recommend this to people with aging parents or people interested in medical nonfiction.
Top Prompts
Featured Prompt
3,356 books#3,356 in What are your favorite books of all time?
When you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...
