Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
2014 • 282 pages
Ratings62
Average rating4.6
15
Ratings62
Average rating4.6
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Very interesting, makes you think about death differently
In a way, this is a brutally tough read. But that's because Gawande does an excellent job of making you comprehend the helpless sense of imprisonment that besets the elderly and terminally ill.
The concept of the patient's conditions for treatment, “I want to be able to watch football and eat chocolate ice cream,” is a profoundly simple but effective way to diminish the burden on your loved ones. There's so much in this book along these lines and while the subject matter is grim, it fills a massive void in end of life wisdom that I doubt many of us would otherwise encounter until it's too late for our loved ones.
It took me over a year to get through it because I kept putting it down, because it's a difficult subject. But, that's the point. EVERYBODY SHOULD READ THIS.
If you love someone who is going to die, or if you yourself are going to die, you should read this. It's so important. Just read it. Stop avoiding it. You'll be glad you did.
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.
