Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. By Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books; 282 pages; $26. Profile; £15.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWOULD life still be worth living if you could watch football on television and eat chocolate ice-cream, but not walk, feed yourself or use the bathroom unaided? How much pain would you accept for the chance of a few extra weeks? And how would you use the time you had left if you knew that no such chance remained?For most people in the developed world, conversations about such topics never take place. Young people remark in passing that they would rather be dead than go into a nursing home; that they do not want to die in hospital; that they do not want a drawn-out, agonising end. The closer that end is, the less it is talked about. The result is that hard choices are made without an understanding of their consequences. More and more people spend their last hours...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1r1ZZW3
No comments:
Post a Comment