Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande
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 endingMedicine 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.
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It was so difficult to not highlight literally every other line in this book (I basically did). I say this for so many books, but everyone should read this. It's so important for anyone going into a healthcare field, but anyone who will deal with illness and death at some point would gain a lot of insight from it (so that would be any human).
I do think there's something to be said for a lack of disability justice perspectives shown in the book. There's a slight mention of this when Gawande says that "it seems we’ve succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible." I would've liked more recognition of different perspectives regarding disability.
"The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is its most basic task. death is the enemy. but the enemy has superior forces. eventually, it wins. and in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation… you want Robert E Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end."(62%)
" we’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. we think our job is to ensure health and survival. but really it is larger than that. it is to enable well-being. and well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive." (86%)
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