Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line - Rilegato

Kaufman, Sharon R.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822359022 ISBN 13: 9780822359029

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"The recommendation by the AMA to Medicare to begin paying physicians for discussions with patients about end-of-life care makes this new book by Sharon Kaufman particularly timely. She explains why the present health care system is biased toward excess treatment at the end of life, and advocates a broad approach to health care reforms that goes beyond cost control to encompass social and ethical considerations." --Victor R. Fuchs, author of"How We Live"

L'autore:

Sharon R. Kaufman is Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of ...And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822359022
• ISBN 13: 9780822359029
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 314