How Medicine Can Improve Life — and Death

Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, tackles what he thinks is the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can improve lives as well as improve the process of dying. He argues that when it comes to aging and death, the goals of medicine are often at odds with the human spirit, and that doctors, committed to extending life, often extend suffering in the end. In his book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Gawande makes the case that quality of life should be the goal for patients and families. He offers examples of better ways to assist the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the ways hospice care can help a person's final weeks to be dignified.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

(Metropolitan Books/Courtesy of the publisher)