Being Mortal: Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We know less and less about our patients but more and more about our science.”
“We end up with institutions that address societal goals-from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families’ hands to coping with poverty among the elderly-but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves”
“We believe that having a longer duration of pain is worse than a shorter duration and that having a greater average level of pain is worse than having a lower average level. But this wasn’t what the patients reported at all. Their final ratings largely ignored the duration of pain. Instead, the ratings were predicted by what Kahneman termed the “Peak-End rule”: an average of the pain experienced at just two moments - the single worst moment of the procedure and the very end.”
“We all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.”
“There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born. One may even come to understand and accept this fact.”
“The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a silver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions-nursing homes and intensive care units-where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.”
“The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it. In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in the final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit”
“The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of diseases as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.”
“Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life’s most importance, for both the dying and those left behind. And it is if, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame.”
“Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends”
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Book Keywords:
dying, aging, perception, atul-gawande, life, death, pain, devotion
