Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

And it's one of those things that stays with you as well as the title being so memorable as well.

Number three was being mortal medicine and what matters in the end.

And that's Atul Gawande who's published three or four books and they're all excellent.

but one of the most important works on the relationship between modern medicine and its limits.

We just...

Perhaps our parting shot is recommending that you read a book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, who's quite a famous American doctor.

And the whole book is about that, really.

It's about how... modern medicine has so focused on extending life without focusing on the quality at the end as well.

And had the same experience that I had when I read something similar.

And I read a book by Atul Gawande called Being Mortal.

Not a Christian, but he's a very wise person on the topic.

And it was one of the reasons I wanted to write something from a Christian perspective.

We put our elderly parents into nursing homes so we can visit them in a minimal amount and then don't have to see what the toll of death takes on them.

And this is not necessarily a Christian book, but I was reading Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, which is kind of about from an Indian culture, how they deal with the elderly and how different it is in modern Western American culture.

So I don't know how much Halloween can help us or not.

Um, but certainly I think our culture lacks something in terms of how we deal with death.

And if you've already read this one, Another book by Birgis is The Covenant of Water, and this is another really sweeping novel with medicine woven into the story.

Next is the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

I think this is one of those books that every physician could benefit from reading, regardless of specialty.

Gawande explores aging, serious illness, death, and the limitations of medicine when we focus exclusively on prolonging life.

A runner up here would be Sarah Hart Unger's recent book, Best Laid Plans, which lays out a somewhat similar nested goal system.

And Unger is a physician herself, which I think adds some credibility in this space.

Next at number eight is From To Do To Done by Maura Thomas.

This is probably my most practical recommendation on the entire list.

So this was, remember, this was in 2008, okay? So this was before there were several books, I think...

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal was one.

And that sort of broke the mold, you know, that, OK, well, this does sell after all.

And so that's that's one thing that I didn't know when I started that having everybody says you have to get an agent.

And if you see it, strangely enough, we actually have the storytelling happening in medicine all the time already, and it is already having effects.

So, for instance, there's a writer named Atul Gawande who wrote a book called Being Mortal.

Being Mortal was all about how we're treating our elderly, how there's a lack of dignity, both in our medical care and our social systems.

After his book, we've had a spike in palliative care and hospice enrollment.

And so it is happening.

Oh, no, no, no. Um, I'm gonna say...

Well, you know, there's one that I [chuckles] I'm ashamed to admit I haven't read it, but my husband loved it, and it seems like it, it seems like a book that anybody in healthcare should read, which is "Being Mortal," Atul Gawande.

Um, yeah, uh, and shame on me for not having read it.

But that, that seems like that'd be a good one to read.

...

some good ones.

I'd, I'd probably put "Being Mortal" at the, at least in terms of the ones that affected me at the, at the top of that list.

But, so Mary, this is awesome.

But I do want to end with one book that I did not write.

But when I read it, it totally blew my mind and changed my way of thinking about aging and death and the book is called being mortal by dr atul gawande and i just think that every person should read that because that's the book that will show you how you know truly what aging and what death is and help us understand accept and and be maybe even happy when we're taking care of people who are at the end of life and truly understand kind of where Were we holding on to them because it's our ego and we just want one more day, we want to win one more day, versus what does it truly mean for them? And so again, Being Mortal by Dr.

Atul Gawande, highly, highly recommend.

Great.