Title: Being Mortal Pdf Medicine and What Matters in the End
In Being Mortal, best-selling 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.
"There is a time for everything..." (Ecclesiastes 3:1) Dr. Gawande writes that modern medicine can extend the limit of our mortality, but there is a finite boundary to that limit. This book is emotionally difficult because the reader and Dr. Gawande confront painful topics that one is loath to consider: aging, frailty and death. Yet, these are essential stages of life and there are essential decisions that one must make at each stage.One can see the signs of aging as they appear on the outside: gray hair, age spots, and wrinkles. Dr. Gawande, a surgeon, also shares what he sees when he peers inside the body of an older patient. Each day some parts of the body die and are remade while others wear and change with constant use. What happens when the limitations of one's aging body require a change in one's lifestyle? There are now many choices and Dr. Gwande rails against settling for just safety and longevity, institutionalization and restriction. He relates the history of nursing homes and visits first-hand the many options for living a life of privacy and community, of vibrancy and purpose. He applauds those in the field of gerentology who have thought "outside the box" for the development of active communities for those who are aged and frail.The reader experiences the morphing of Dr. Gawande from a mere practitioner to the son of a dying parent. How does a doctor broach the difficult end-of-life options with terminally ill patients and loved ones? The menu of medical options for treatment can be insufficient and it is essential that the practitioner also ask the patient what she or he wants most in the finite time remaining. Is it a mistake to prolong suffering or is it better to provide value in a shortened life? The author suggests that courage is required for both aging and sickness: the courage to confront the reality of mortality and the courage to act on the truth of that reality. Have the courage and the wisdom, dear reader, to explore these difficult topics presented in the pages of this transformative book.
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