Now, more than a decade after I first told Mr. Lazaroff’s story, what strikes me most is not how bad his decision was but how much we all avoided talking honestly about the choice before him. It was in a weekly seminar called Patient-Doctor—part of the school’s effort to make us more rounded and humane physicians. . Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. ‘Being mortal’ is synonymous with being human, and yet most of us are notoriously bad at planning for the inevitable. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. . I’d seen multiple family members—my wife, my parents, and my children—go through serious, life-threatening illnesses. Somehow the concept didn’t occur to me, even when I saw people my own age die. I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed—victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle? ROBERT C. YOUNG, MD. May it be widely read and inwardly digested.” ―Diana Athill, Financial Times (UK)“Being Mortal, Atul Gawande's masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.” ―Boston Globe“American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. As someone who is solidly on the right side of life's bell-shaped curve, this reviewer found Being Mortal enlightening, instructive, and humanizing. Please try again. As doctors it can be difficult to embrace death when we seek so often to defy it, but medical care in the dying period can be as essential for patients as any other kind of treatment. And what if there are better approaches, right in front of our eyes, waiting to be recognized? I had recurring nightmares in which I’d find my patients’ corpses in my house—in my own bed. 3 0 obj Title: Being Mortal Medicine And What Matters In The End Author: ��Diana Baader Subject: ��Being Mortal Medicine And What Matters In The End . “But the enemy has superior forces. Unable to add item to List. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. He knew he was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore what he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it.”. One may even come to understand and accept this fact. Mortality can be a treacherous subject. 1 2 . You become a doctor for what you imagine to be the satisfaction of the work, and that turns out to be the satisfaction of competence. One day, he falls off a stepladder and develops a pain in his side. The first edition of the novel was published in October 7th 2014, and was written by Atul Gawande. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions. “We think. “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.” Ivan Ilyich has flashes of hope that maybe things will turn around, but as he grows weaker and more emaciated he knows what is happening. And in a war you cannot win, you do not want a general who fights to the point of annihilation. 7) But these contemporary care centers face two major obstacles: Regulations, which place legal constraints on them to insure safety, and the constant intervention from medicine's desire to fix. London NW1 2FB '573�������w�ލ�h�ȭ����c�940��?�\���J�. /Type /XObject Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying.

Those who saw the palliative care specialist entered hospice earlier, stopped chemotherapy earlier, experienced less suffering, and lived 25 percent longer (Temel et al: NEJM 2010;363:733-742).