Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography) - Hardcover

Kaufman, Sharon R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822359022 ISBN 13: 9780822359029

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

"Sharon R. Kaufman has made an important and disturbing discovery about the links between for-profit healthcare companies, so-called evidence-based medicine, doctors, and patients. Ordinary Medicine should be read, thought about, and acted upon by those who have the power to effect change."
  (Victoria Sweet, author of God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine)

"I devoured Ordinary Medicine. It gave me courage. It helped me delineate, sometimes for the first time, the interlocking forces and practices that have helped create an epidemic of unnecessary suffering at the end of life. Breathtaking in its scope, rigor, and intellectual range, this book will help readers take back control of their lives and deaths from the forces that have created an 'ordinary' end-of-life medicine that is far from ordinary." (Katy Butler, author of Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death)

"Ordinary Medicine is an exploration of how what is essentially experimental medicine can become 'standard care.'  In this thoroughly researched book, many of our assumptions are shaken. The system that is extant would seem aligned to prevent us from accepting death as a natural life progression and offering in its place prolonged suffering. A truly engaging and provocative read." (Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone)

"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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822359022
• ISBN 13: 9780822359029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336