Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

"Yes, and this book is not so much about cancer. It’s more about aging and death—but, as I said, aging and cancer are two sides of the same coin, and death is the common denominator of both. This is another classic, where Gawande is asking us—and the medical community—to reconsider how we think about life and death in particular. The medical community is sustaining the modern fear of—and distance from—the concept of death, and it’s time to confront our own mortality. A dead patient is generally regarded as a failure of modern medicine. That’s also how we write about cancer—we say, ‘She lost her fight with cancer’—even though she might have had a rich life and reached 83 years of age. Is that a loss, or is that a win? I would say it’s a win. Atul Gawande bridges medicine and philosophy in a thoughtful manner, although it might not be a book for everybody. It is profound and philosophical. Yes. We do need a public conversation about death. Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a very provocative blog on the BMJ site, where he argued that cancer is the best death. He got a huge backlash for that. It’s about opening up the conversation about death and asking, ‘What is the best death’? Is the best death to die suddenly in your sleep, or to have a heart attack while you’re skiing? He said, ‘Maybe not. Maybe it’s better to have time to prepare, to say a proper goodbye.’ Is dementia any better than cancer? The answer is probably very individual. It all depends. But we need to have the conversation. It’s very easy to say, ‘Cancer is the worst death, and this is the bad enemy.’ That is how we have been taught to think about it. That’s the image cancer has in society. But as more and more people are going to die of cancer, is that a useful way to think about it? It’s a paradox. The healthier you are, the older you get, the more likely you are to get cancer in the end. So, if you want to live a long and healthy life, you should prepare to die of cancer. Being Mortal is all about accepting that death is a part of life. Unfortunately, I see more and more people refusing to accept that and looking to technology to solve the problem for us. As I mentioned, I’m afraid this approach will lead us astray, and that is also what Gawande is telling us."