Clarity and compassion unite in this touching and convincing new conversation on comfortable, patient-centered end-of-life...
End-stage patient suffering and distress inspire an early-career watershed moment for a sympathetic physician.
Zitter’s impassioned advocacy for increased palliative awareness in modern medical establishments is both immediate and heartfelt. She notes that both doctors and patients have a tendency to ignore death, and this often “fuels a tremendous amount of suffering.” Her own enlightenment began during her medical internship, when she harbored serious second thoughts about her career choice (her father was a neurosurgeon) after being “dumbstruck by this Armageddon” of critically ill patients throughout her first years in trauma medicine. “I have rehearsed for the wrong performance,” she thought during a crisis of conscience. After much soul-searching, Zitter moved in a new professional direction, focusing on compassionate palliative care rather than treating pain as an “on–off switch.” The often wrenching, emotionally resonant patient cases she shares illuminate an urgent need for medical communities to more uniformly embrace standards of care that include palliative approaches to terminal patients. Empathy and patient dignity have a tendency to evaporate amid a hard-core push to medically prolong life without humane consideration for a patient’s eroded quality of life. Zitter describes the origins of palliative care as well as her somewhat steep learning curve adjusting to a holistic care approach. She also addresses issues of physician burnout, the delicate politics of do-not-resuscitate orders, and the challenging time sensitivity of communicating terminal prognoses. Her affecting narrative is also educative, as the author aims to create a paradigm shift in terminal patient treatment and steer medical trends and attitudes about death and dying toward a more sympathetic perspective and one that will eventually consider it “unacceptable to practice without considering the patient’s needs above all else.” A list of useful resources and Zitter’s six-step approach to one’s own final health care choices serve as fitting codas.
Clarity and compassion unite in this touching and convincing new conversation on comfortable, patient-centered end-of-life care.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98255-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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