Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End [B0848]

2014 HCDJ in nice clean condition. Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune. 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. Here 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Stunning book about end of life issues."; "A smart and insightful look at how we can better care for ourselves and our loved ones as aging progresses."; "This book runs towards all of the questions we avoid asking ourselves and our families. What happens at the end? How do we want to die? How do we care for our parents? The question, how do we want to die is intimately intertwined with the question, how do we want to live? Atul elucidates this and colors it with a story about his own father. At times this book was extremely difficult to read, but it has given me a new perspective on life and death and how I want to care for my parents and how I want to be cared for. Absolutely stunning job and I would recommend this book and will re-read it myself."