being mortal

A call to action at all levels, from the upper reaches of the health system to medical schools to individual doctors and health care workers, to every day individuals. I feel like it should be part of medical school curricula. C and I spent some time in the park yesterday reading and enjoying the sunshine and we talked a bit about how physicians have gone from being paternalistic deciders to informers who let their patient/customer make health decisions. This is a theme Gawande addresses throughout the book, and he confesses that he himself is most comfortable in the "informer" role. He brings up the Zeke and (??? forget her name) Emanuel piece where they describe a third way for doctors to be, in which the doctor's role is to find out what the patient most desires, and then guide the patient to that outcome to the extent possible.

System broken -- amazing the extent to which Gawande makes this case, he says outright that the medical approach to end-of-life care has "failed." Needs fixing. Fixes are simple but not easy. The end.

Written so much in the New Yorker house style.