Ordinary Medicine
Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medical anthropologist Kaufman bravely delves into the heartbreaking predicament of modern medicine: "getting the medicine we wish for but then having to live with the unsettling and far-ranging consequences." She argues that the "drivers" governing medicine are the biomedical research industry and its clinical trials, Medicare and insurance decisions on what gets reimbursed, the determination of a "standard of care," and the intractability of those standards all of which are typically profit-driven factors that have set the bar for what is considered routine or taken for granted. Yet this "ordinary medicine" doesn't help patients or doctors make the hard choices on when to stop treatments, Kaufman worries. For example, she writes, the implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) is being used as a primary prevention device for a sudden heart attack despite a lack of evidence for its widespread necessity. Kaufman is at her best when focusing on the heartbreaking dilemma of patients dealing with the consequences of ordinary medicine, such as an elderly patient who must choose between lifesaving treatments or palliative care, facing repeated hospital visits regardless of the choice. Kaufman calls for no less than making the ethics of medicine the "preeminent topic of our national conversation about health care reform."