Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
A Medical, Nonfiction, Science book. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its momentswhich, after all, is...
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....
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 282 pages
- ISBN: 9780805095159 / 805095152
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More About Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties. This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of ones lifeto avoid becoming... In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its momentswhich, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger... Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you dont, mortality is only a horror.My great aunt lived to be 102 years old. She would often say, looking at the younger generations, Its wonderful to get old. Gawande touches on this in his memoir chronicling... There is a long phase in the first parts of our lives where, if we are lucky enough to have avoided critical disease or injury, we are blithely unaware of the effects of aging and of the inevitability of death. It seems so far ahead in the future as to be imaginary. Like imagining what a trillion dollars is like. You know that is a... Anyone who is planning on dying some day should read this book. It can be jumpy at times, but overall, Gawande's a straight shooting, no-nonsense writer who gives the straight dope on nursing homes, assisted living, hospice, and the heart-rending decisions we are all forced into at our end-of-days. As many of his accounts deal with...
