She grew up in times when almost all doctors practiced what the Italians had taken to calling Slow Medicine: they made house calls, earned incomes roughly equal to those of their patients, served the same families for decades, didn‘t get gifts from drug and device salesmen, and didn‘t prescribe technologies they indirectly profited from.
When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery...
Nothing much will change until we pay doctors and hospitals when they appropriately do less as well as we do when they inappropriately do too much.
When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend.
pickAnd I finished this one yesterday. (I know. Uplifting reading choice for the holidays). I'm fascinated by books on end-of-life care, a la Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, and Ray Moynihan's Selling Sickness. This mix of memoir and investigative journalism was thoughtful and beautifully written. I borrowed it from the library, but will be picking up a copy for my permanent collection.
Once read a piece by Butler in Creative Nonfiction, or maybe The Sun, on end-of-life decisions. I thought it was gorgeous and fascinating and thoughtful and I've been meaning to read this book ever since.
Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death | 
