Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

By Atul Gawande

Book Overview

#1 New York Times Bestseller

In Being Mortal, bestselling 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.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805095152
• ISBN13: 9780805095159
• Release Date: October 2014
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A must read for everyone

This book serves as a guide to our lives and how we want the end of our lives to be - pain free and loved. Helping our loved ones navigate end of life or our own end of life is difficult. Gawande wrote a valuable book to guide us. I've given copies to all of my family and friends and recommend it in my teaching on caring for someone with dementia disease. It is helpful for anyone who is dealing with or caring for someone with a terminal condition.

A MUST read for all senior citizens and their families.