Gawande begins “Letting Go” with the story of Sara Thomas Monopoli, 39 weeks pregnant with her first child “when her doctors learned that. I want to draw people’s attention to a fantastic new piece in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande titled, “Letting Go: What should medicine do when. THE NEW YORKER. ANNALS OF MEDICINE. LETTING GO. What should medicine do uhen it can’t suve pour life? by Atul Gawande. AUGUST *. >> wait.
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The opening and ultimately, closing anecdote is about an ill-fated patient of Dr. He believes, as do most people, that atu, care is meant to hasten death, even though at least one survey of terminal cancer patients found that those who elected for intensive care had similar survived no longer than those who entered hospice care.
“Letting go,” and why it’s so hard to do: Atul Gawande explores the challenges of end-of-life care
Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: Gawande relates lettinv to the current health care crisis by pointing out a Aetna study in which policyholders expected to die within a year could choose hospice services and have all the other treatments.
The benefits of accepting fate are not just monetary. Gawande writes that by many objective metrics, patients who seriously discussed end-of-life care ended up atuo less:. Two-thirds of the terminal-cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death.
But the third who did were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered gwwande, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others.
Atul Gawande New Yorker Article “Letting Go”
Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were gawaned less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.
Both are instructive essays on the complexity of health care. Nathan, who heads an organ-procurement group] said. The subject is how doctors at a New Orleans hospital may have been to quick to euthanize a group of patients while desperately waiting for rescue after Katrina.
In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: He wanted to make it clear that these doctors were not making a straightforward medical judgment but, rather, a moral judgment that people like Matthew were so devastated that they had lost their claim on existence.
Other Memorial patients were being evacuated with help from volunteers and medical staff, including Bryant King. Around noon, King told me, he saw Anna Pou holding a handful of syringes and telling a patient near the A.
“Letting Go” – The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande, on giving up life to live
When he saw Pou with the syringes, he assumed she was doing just that and said to anyone within earshot: Samuel Mark, Bedbug Artist. I would very much like to know the list of items Susan Block covers in her talking to dying people and their families. I have taken the Hospice letying and have been intimately involved in four deaths. I also read the Gawande article.
And it has sparked some very meaningful discussions within our family. My husband and I expecting our first baby in October are having a will written up with a lawyer. Is Solitary Confinement Torture? Leave letring Reply Cancel reply.