Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

by Atul Gawande

Book Overview

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune, now in paperback with a new reading group guide

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Here he examines its ultimate limitations and failures--in his own practices as well as others'--as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life--all the way to the very end.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250076226
• ISBN13: 9781250076229
• Release Date: September 2017
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.2"

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.