Thank you for this testimony. “a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose…” for your mother do I pray…

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

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. 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. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. 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.

Full 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.

A truly compassionate, gifted man and physician.

Thanks for the insight. I am my wife’s business manager and it is rather striking how much and how rapidly medicine is changing. The general “health care consumer” has no idea. One of the doctor’s my wife works with likes to point out the differences between our system and England’s (where he worked for 20 years). He likes to go down the inpatient list and explain how this or that person would simply be dead in England. He also talks about the ways in which our system is rapidly conforming to that rationed model.

I am rather pessimistic anything can be done about it however. Too many factors are contributing to the direction we are headed…

As a physician who trained in hospice in the 1980’s as a volunteer before going to a Catholic medical school, and now an Eastern Orthodox physician, I would only say that tragically in my office, medical society, and personal life I have learned it is a rare hospice which deals with patients as originally envisioned or as consistent with the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic way much less the Hippocratic Oath.

Please read the cautionary tales on the website under Euthanasia. Please learn on the site what questions to ask to understand what your loved one will actually go through and why. The goal of original hospice was to keep a person as comfortable and fully present and him/herself as possible by whatever means was appropriate so he or she could with dignity and a clear mind reconcile with family, oneself and with God.

That was “palliative care” then and as it should be. Now starvation and dehydration (which are quite painful) may be masked by heavy pain med sedation so that the person is quiet while being killed early essentially.

You may see a family joking with staff in a party atmosphere and not “with” the immobile and unresponsive patient at all. It is all quite bizarre, deceptive, and not loving, respectful and filled with dignity as intended.

Our goal is to restore hospice to its rightful function. Not to have truly comforting medications denied due to expense and called “extraordinary measures” when previously it would have simply been part of good care to optimize how the patient feels and can function. I am always grateful when someone has had a good experience with hospice recently; they are blessed.

Please see this website and fight for your loved one to receive the “original” hospice care, hospicepatients.org. I have no involvement with it, just somber appreciation.