Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

by Atul Gawande

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Gawande argues that modern medicine, fixated on survival at all costs, systematically fails people at the end of life by mistaking the medical problem of preventing death for the human problem of preserving meaning and autonomy. He draws on hospice care, assisted-living research, and his own family's experience to argue that doctors must have hard conversations about priorities rather than defaulting to more treatment.

Published:: 2014
Pages:: 282

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End references 4 other books.

It draws on The Checklist Manifesto, The Denial of Death and The Emperor of All Maladies.

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What This Book Draws On

The books Gawande references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Gawande extends his own Checklist Manifesto argument about manageing medical complexity, applying systematic thinking to end-of-life decisions where checklists alone cannot substitute for values conversations

References

The Checklist Manifesto

by Atul Gawande

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Draws on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death to frame how Western medicine institutionalizes our avoidance of mortality, replacing acceptance with heroic intervention

References

The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

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Builds on Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies in discussing oncology's default toward aggressive treatment, citing the same clinical trial data on dying cancer patients

References

The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Echoes Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in arguing that dying patients need a sense of meaning and purpose more than they need added days of life

References

Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor Frankl

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Intellectual Lineage

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Directly cites

The Checklist Manifesto

The Denial of Death

The Emperor of All Maladies

Man's Search for Meaning

2 steps back

The Mythical Man-Month

The Immortal Life of Henriet...

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