Genevieve's Reviews > Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

* Originally reviewed on the Night Owls Press blog here. *

I was first introduced to Atul Gawande's writing in his "Annals of Medicine" column for The New Yorker magazine. He wrote a thrilling piece about a woman with an itch—an itch so strong, so persistent, it was beyond belief. It stumped all of her doctors. Medications didn't work. MRIs and nerve tests revealed nothing conclusive. One night, the woman woke up to fluid dripping down her face. As if in some B-horror movie, Gawande eventually reveals that she had scratched through bone, through her very own skull, into her brain. Delving into neuroscience and how our brains work and the nature of perception, Gawande wrote a piece as compelling as a forensic thriller. It wasn't just a dry reporting of medical cases and scientific findings. Gawande quoted lines from Dante's Inferno. It read like a story.

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal Medicine and What Matters in the End is less an out-and-out thriller and more a personal meditation on modern medicine and how it has treated illness, aging, and dying. Being Mortal pulls back the veil on the institutions that treat the terminally ill and aging. It is a clear-eyed exploration of the sad business of dying and our bodies falling apart, taking us on a tour of gerontology, nursing homes, intensive care units, assisted-living facilities, and multigenerational homes.

It is also a calm critique on medicine. He writes: "Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. ... It's been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs."

Gawande's message: The experiment has failed. Twenty-first century medicine can do miraculous things. But in dealing with end-of-life issues, modern medicine has been dismal.

Quality of life has been the most overlooked metric in medical treatments. The measure of success for doctors is prolonging life, even if those extra days, weeks, months are miserable and and full of pain. But according to Gawande it's not the fault of doctors or patients. It's an entire culture we've built up: how we think of and treat the elderly, how everyone expects doctors to do everything it takes, to offer and try every medical procedure possible to slow down the inevitable.

And there is a lot to fear, too—not just in the inevitable—but in the choices we're given. Gawande doesn't shy away from how this topic hits close to home. His wife's grandmother and his own father are two people who are discussed intimately throughout the book. He weaves the stories about their health and decline with the stories of other patients and colleagues.

When describing how his own father struggled with the decision on whether to pursue more radiation therapy for a tumor growing in his spine, Gawande dwells on the tough decisions that needed to be made. His father had already undergone surgery to treat it, but things had taken a turn for the worse. Should he pursue more aggressive chemo, knowing the debilitating side effects that would happen? It is a question that faces many families when they sit in the doctor's office and have to weigh the tradeoffs. Having choices doesn't necessarily make it easier.

At the heart of the book is a searching exploration of what the basic purpose of medicine really is. What should we be paying doctors to do? Gawande writes: "Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general [a doctor] who fights to the point of total annihilation."

Fight to the bitter end… sadly, that's what most people try to do.

More and more, as the population in the U.S. gets older and as we live longer, we need more doctors and nurses like Gawande who will broach discussion and say what they have seen, to tell people how death in a hospital really is, how aging really is, and prepare us for what's to come.

So what needs to be done? Gawande suggests several things, and the message is clear: We need more of our institutions and medical practitioners to believe that we shouldn't limit people's choices in the name of safety but expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life. We see this in the later chapters when we meet more enlightened practitioners and how they take a more patient-centric approach rather than a paternalistic one. There is a wonderful anecdote that involves a colorful menagerie and an idealistic country doctor.

While Gawande is critical and often frames his exploration of medicine in big socioeconomic and cultural terms, his arguments don't take sides. He doesn't write to bully or polarize; instead, he takes a deliberate, sometimes plodding "middle road." I sometimes wished he would be more scathing of some of the atrocious experiences he hears about and even witnesses. He doesn't loudly condemn bad decisions that were made in prescribing care or stripping away an elderly person's autonomy. Instead, what he is good at is to acknowledge uncertainty and ambiguity. All of us have underestimated the human element in medicine in some way.

An intense, thought-provoking read that made me more mindful about life—and the march toward the inevitable.

[Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher for an honest and candid review. This review was originally written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.]