Atul Gawande's Being Mortal is an excellent examination of aging and dying in America. It deals with the hard questions that anyone encountering these must ask as they try to make sense of a whirlwind of emotions and medical options that seem to take over their lives.
After trying out his hand with a successful, if obvious play at Gladwell style pontification in The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande is back at what he does best: humanizing the modern practice of medicine which mostly seems stiff and weirdly detached from its subjects.
This is an important book that anyone with aging and dying is on their agenda should read.
In this book Gawande is successfully able to present the overwhelming challenges that both patients and their families face. He makes us understand how unprepared we really are. And why shouldn't we be? Aging and death are things that happen to others, at least that's what we think, if we think about it at all.
‘Being Mortal’ expands on the ideas Atul Gawande wrote about over two articles in The New Yorker where he is a staff writer. It takes us on a tour of what we potentially have in store for us in the dusk of our lives. We may be condemned to a Nursing Home or we may be a bit better off in Assisted Living or we may actually get lucky and die peacefully with family if you choose Hospice care.
We learn about the common ways the doctors approach patients - those who take leadership and tell us what to do, a model popular in developing countries. Or those who give us the pros and cons and expect us to pick how to proceed - like we’d really know. This model is popular in the West and is really the worst model. And then the ideal model which is somewhere between the other two. Someone who listens and takes ownership but also takes the patient’s general choices into account. And this is the type of doctor we need to find.
And finally, the author lays bare his personal experience with death, the most revealing and painful part of the book, which, adds a great bit of pathos and credibility to the writing. And Atul Gawande is an excellent writer. Very calm and composed and relaxed. He genuinely wants to tell these stories and help us understand the challenges that both doctors and patients face specially when faced with emotionally charged situations such as the care of a loved one.
This is definitely Atul Gawande’s best book to date, though I liked both his earlier works ‘Complications’ (2003) and ‘Better’ (2007) a lot as well.