Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
"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." (image & summary from worldcat.org)
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The author, a surgeon, discusses the fact that old age and death have been turned into medical experiences. Sometimes we get so fixated on the "repair of health" (even when the "repair" can cause more problems than it fixes), that we neglect the "sustenance of the soul." (128)
When you get older there are some things that just can't be "repaired." But we always can sustain our souls no matter what's going on physically.
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