Another result is doctors avoiding geriatrics where complete cures are a rare commodity. As a result, it often tries invasive surgeries and treatments even when the chance of success is quite negligible and the side effects render patients’ final few months painful and devoid of the things most precious to them. How can the elderly best navigate the physical and mental decline of advanced years? What do we want a person’s last few weeks to be like? How do we evaluate the comparative worth of duration of life versus quality of life? Gawande, a surgeon from Boston with three previous popular books about medicine to his credit, has written an extremely wise and compassionate volume.ĭue to its great achievements, modern medicine thinks in terms of fixing people but not in terms of helping them in a broader sense. Summary: Modern medicine has significantly extending the average human lifespan, a positive change which also engenders complications and novel questions. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
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