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Monday, September 16, 2019

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

This is a very good (and not terribly long) book about how to visualize your own end of life, and perhaps more importantly, the end of the lives of people who are dear to you.  The thing that is seen over and over again in medicine, and the author himself struggled with is when to stop treating a patient and start to ease their passage into the here after.
He argues that physicians are not particularly good at framing the questions that come up at the end of life, and therefore we end up doing our patients a huge disservice.  We are full steam ahead with what to do next if this intervention fails, but we are not as good at including the patient in the decisions about what to do.  It is the embodiment of a patient centered approach to end of life.
The author describes some unpleasant outcomes that flow from the do everything approach, then talks about his own father's decline and his reaction to it, and then using what he learned from that experience to be a better doctor for a terminally ill patient he was caring for.  It is a must read before you put a loved one through unnecessary pain and suffering.

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