Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End pdf Download

[Carolien Rosenberg]

Being Mortal: Healing and What Matters at the End is a book by American author Atul Gawande. The book mainly addresses end-of-life issues, such as hospice and palliative care. In the introduction, Gawande explains that medicine is more than just treating disease but is also about helping people live healthy and meaningful lives after they are gone. Being Mortal includes Gawande's personal stories and reflections as he contemplates death. He believes that good medical care should emphasize well-being instead of survival, and he advocates that end-of-life medicine should become a truly holistic art.

Download Here : Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Gawande, Atul (Hardcover).pdf

 

Although the book covers various end-of-life issues, the bulk of the book concerns its focus on how doctors can provide compassionate and quality care to dying patients while respecting their dignity. For example, Atul Gawande repeatedly emphasizes the importance of not performing a c-section delivery or taking organs from patients who are not expected to die. He recognizes the emotional and physical trauma that children go through when they lose a parent, but he emphasizes that children deserve to be treated with dignity even when they are not expected to die. He wrote, "Children are sometimes less willing to suffer pain or to die than adults." Throughout the text, Atul Gawande repeatedly insists that his emphasis on quality and compassion is universal and goes beyond the specifics of his experience as a doctor.

One of the most striking things I learned about Atul Gawande through reading his book is that he seems to have a genuine concern for dying patients. He describes what it was like to see a patient who is dying from lung cancer, only to express his empathy for the family and offer words of comfort, encouragement, and hope. He described the last minutes of a patient in a hospice unit as those few precious minutes that a patient would have only a few short years left to live. I learned that being mortal is simply a short period of time in the grand scheme of human life.