Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Author: Atul Gawande

I am always puzzled at how Indian Doctors write so much better than Indian Engineers. It certainly helps that they have many more interesting stories to tell, but Atul is a master at taking something relatively simple, like “checklists” and writing a great book about its importance. In this one, he tackles our Mortality.  He starts out by telling us what the current state of affairs is in the US for people who are on death’s door. Yes, we do spend a ton of money on just the last 6 months of a person's life, knowing fully well that it is not going to be effective. Atul characterizes this as a "multi-trillion dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets”.  However, the even more frustrating consequence is that we are making the elderly miserable in the process. In the last years of their life on this planet, most people feel that their nurses and doctors are taking away their control and turning them into babies.

If you have parents or loved ones who are approaching their sunset years, I highly recommend this book. It highlights the importance of having a conversation with them and understanding what is important to them as they get older. Maybe there are certain things like eating food or going to the bathroom by themselves that they just don’t want to give up. If that is the case, figure out the best way to arrange their care with their desires in mind. Just prolonging their life at the cost of making them miserable does not make sense at all.