Extreme Measures / Finding a Better Path to the End of Life (SIGNED BY AUTHOR)

Zitter, Jessica Nutik, MD

ISBN 10: 1101982551 / ISBN 13: 9781101982556

Published by Avery / An imprint of Penguin Random House, New York, 2017

About this Item

Number line complete 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -- the first printing. Doctors face doubt and criticism from nurses and their own associates when they inform families of a comatose patient's actual dire prognosis, and ask if they'd prefer a natural death. 338 pp. including Index. Reduced from $50.

Seller Inventory # 010274

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Extreme Measures / Finding a Better Path to the End of Life (SIGNED BY AUTHOR)
• Publisher: Avery / An imprint of Penguin Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1101982551
• ISBN 13: 9781101982556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Health & Medicine
  • The Freedom Bookshelf

About this title

Synopsis

For readers of Being Mortal and Modern Death, an ICU and Palliative Care specialist offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level


In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die.

Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care—to become an ICU physician—and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice.

Extreme Measures charts Zitter’s journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another—a doctor who prioritizes the patient’s values and preferences in an environment where the default choice is the extreme use of technology. In our current medical culture, the old and the ill are put on what she terms the End-of-Life  Conveyor belt. They are intubated, catheterized, and even shelved away in care facilities to suffer their final days alone, confused, and often in pain. In her work Zitter has learned what patients fear more than death itself: the prospect of dying badly. She builds bridges between patients and caregivers, formulates plans to allay patients’ pain and anxiety, and enlists the support of loved ones so that life can end well, even beautifully.

Filled with rich patient stories that make a compelling medical narrative, Extreme Measures enlarges the national conversation as it thoughtfully and compassionately examines an experience that defines being human.

About the Author

Jessica Nutik Zitter, M.D., MPH, is an expert on the medical experience of death and dying. She attended Stanford University and Case Western Reserve Medical School, and completed her residency in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Zitter is double-boarded in the two specialties of pulmonary/critical care medicine and palliative care medicine—a rare combination. She writes for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, The Atlantic, and Journal of Palliative Medicine, and is featured in Extremis, an Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary about end-of-life decision-making in an ICU.