Traditionally, nursing homes have been organized to provide an efficient medical care to frail and impaired individuals with little or no attention given to quality of life. Nevertheless, at some time during their life, many of them will be admitted to a nursing home. In order to maintain the integrity of their social network, and enjoy a higher quality of life, most elderly people would prefer to remain in their homes as long as possible. 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.įull of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.Francesco Iannuzzella wrote the summary for chapter 5. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families.
Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. 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. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. 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
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