Klik på en miniature for at gå til Google Books
Indlæser... Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (original 2006; udgave 2008)af Pauline W. Chen (Forfatter)
Work InformationFinal Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality af Pauline W. Chen (2006)
Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. This review originally appeared on my blog www.gimmethatbook.com. Final Exam was a book I picked up myself from the library. It was on my own personal reading list, which I haven’t been really able to get to these days. This is not a new book; it was published in 2007, but the ideas that Dr Chen speaks of should be relevant and in use today. The mission of all doctors is to maintain life–by performing surgery, by prescribing medication, by encouraging life changes such as dieting or quitting smoking. But–everyone eventually dies, no matter how brilliant the surgeon was, or how much weight a patient lost. Many doctors gloss over this fact and prefer to focus on living and making a better quality of life. Who will champion a better quality of death? No, Dr Chen is not going to talk about euthanasia, or discuss funeral services. She is going to bring to the forefront a subject that has been assiduously avoided in human medicine for a long time: death is very much a part of life, and it should not be spoken of in hushed tones or pushed to the back of one’s mind. To truly care for your patients, you must realize that death is truly part of life. No one wants to consider their own mortality, especially someone who is going to the hospital for an operation. Dr Chen postulates that all doctors can give better care by embracing their own personal feelings and fears about death, and listening to what their patients are telling them, either with words or what their body is saying. There is a great deal of explicit description in Final Exam: of medical procedures and people struggling to die, those with sickness or those who have developed complications after surgery. Dr Chen starts out with her own personal experience with a cadaver in medical school and brings us all the way to her visceral reaction when a good friend of hers dies. This book’s message is a powerful one, and not for the faint of heart. I thoroughly applaud Dr Chen for suggesting that doctors make themselves more emotionally available and vulnerable. Too often a patient’s death is couched in a sense of failure, of medicine gone wrong. A delicate balance needs to be attained, and I hope Dr Chen has started a dialogue by writing this book. I loved this. You can pick up your own copy here. I can't remember when I read Final Exam, but all the buzz about Atul Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, reminded me how good it was. I will read Gawande's book too, but thought I should add this to the list. It's too bad that it looks like Pauline Chen has not published another book since, but she is writing regularly for the NY Times. This books shows the humanity of working in the medical profession. From the start of medical school to her current position, Pauline Chen, really helps express why the medical system is the way it is, those who try to correct it. The medical profession is made up of humans in a rigid, non perfect system. We as patients should provide assistance to nudge doctors who want to do the right thing to go ahead. And be a poke for those who do not want to bother. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
Distinctions
A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives--what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Over the course of her education, training, and practice, she grappled at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, struggling to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure. Her rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a provocative questioning of how we should live.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsIngenPopulære omslag
Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)617.092Technology Medicine and health Surgery, regional medicine, dentistry, ophthalmology, otology, audiology Biography; History By Place BiographyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
Er det dig?Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter. |
Despite the fact that I am well-versed in the palliative literature and had read many of the articles Dr. Chen cited her personal experiences lend a depth and character to the discussion that is priceless. Dr. Chen's strength is that she is brutally honest. She describes unflinchingly her avoidance of patients that were dying and her regret of being too terse at times. She discusses events that other medical non-fiction would gloss over.
My only grievances with the book is the end-notes. The book is rife with them (at one point there are three end notes corresponding to a single sentence) and they are not marked at all in the main text, although they are designed to refer to particular sentences in the main text. The end notes are written in a different style than the main narrative, and detract from the flow. By and large they fall into three categories: those that are essential to the text and directly related to the main text; those that are essential to the text, but not directly related to the main text and those that are not essential. The first two categories should have been integrated into the narrative and the third should have been eliminated. ( )