Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Embracing Our Mortality is an excellent book by an outstanding physician, medical ethicist and gifted writer. Dr. Schneiderman covers many of the problems that physicians, nurses and families experience in dealing with very sick and dying patients, be they stricken with cancer, AIDS or suffering at the end of a normal life. He uses well known case studies (Eg. Terri Schiavo)to drive home his points regarding the excesses of uncalled for medical heroics near the end of ones life. He reputes the commonly held belief that psychological coping styles, including hope, can influence event free survival in patients with cancer. Yet, he provides sound, realistic advice that will provide comfort for the patient and the families of the terminally ill.
His discussion of alternative medicine, its providers and its clueless,celebrity, unscientific supporters is a must read. So many patients are led astray by the unfounded promises of alternative medicine treatments.
This is a book for doctors, nurses, patients, their families, the elderly, and hopefully will be read by our politicians.
Carl E. Bartecchi
Click Here to see more reviews about: Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles
While surveys show that most of us would prefer to die at home, 80% of us will die in a health care facility, many hooked up to machines and faced with tough decisions. When you, a family member, or a friend are in this situation, what should you do next? In Embracing Our Mortality, Dr. Lawrence J. Schneiderman, a physician who is our leading expert on medical ethics at the end of life, urges all of us, including health care professionals caring for people at the end of life, to face these decisions with sensitivity and realism informed by both the latest medical evidence as well as the oldest humanistic visions. Dr. Schneiderman vividly demonstrates the wisdom of this approach by interweaving true stories of his patients, current empirical research in care at the end of life, displays of the power of empathy and imagination as embodied in the work of writers like Tolstoy and Chekov, and examples of how the distortion of medical research by media, and its misunderstanding even by health care professionals, cloud the ability to think, feel, and decide clearly about mortal concerns. He ends by addressing the question implicit in all of this which is how to achieve a just and universal health care. Dr. Schneiderman proves a refreshingly honest, astringent, and life-affirming guide to thinking about the choices that we or people we love will face when we dienot if, as the technological imperatives of modern medicine can suggestand to making decisions at the end of life that respect all that has preceded it.
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