A timely, informed contribution to the ongoing debate over our nation’s health care policies.
A moving argument for the reform of end-of-life care.
In 2010, as her mother declined from dementia, anesthesiologist Overton (Good in a Crisis, 2012) enrolled in a nine-month Executive Education course at the Harvard Business School called Managing Healthcare Delivery. She was searching for answers about the failures of the health care system, particularly about ways in which practitioners treat dying patients. In a patient’s last year of life, she discovered, “nearly one in three had surgery”; in the last month, “nearly one out of five”; and in the last week, “nearly one out of ten….Those are astounding numbers,” she admits, and believes the profit motive—on the parts of drug companies and hospitals—is driving unnecessary and expensive interventions. Patients who undergo such treatment do not live longer than those in hospice, where the cost is about one-third of that in hospitals. Interwoven with her reflections on the Harvard course and her own medical work, the author sensitively recounts her parents’ last years. Her father endured bouts of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery for metastasized cancer, each time told by physicians that he would not suffer. But he did: “is lying easier than telling people the truth?” Overton asks. “We routinely make people suffer for no clear benefit except to ourselves,” she writes, and communicate in “euphemisms and circumlocutions.” Eventually, her father experienced excellent hospice care, but her mother had a less positive experience. With hospice now “big business,” Overton strongly recommends comparison shopping. She also advocates setting up medical directives, making wishes known to loved ones, and being aware of such organizations as Compassion & Choices and the Final Exit Network. Based on her personal and professional experiences, the author is convinced that neither legislation alone nor the health care industry can solve its complex problems. Capitalism, she concludes has “ruined healthcare.”
A timely, informed contribution to the ongoing debate over our nation’s health care policies.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937402-90-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Outpost19
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Poor Provence. Like some geographical cousin to the Golden Goose, it is sentenced to an eternity of laying golden eggs for Mayle (Up the Agency, 1993, etc.). In this extravagant book, Mayle teams up with Jason Hawkes, whose aerial photographs of vineyards, asymmetrically laid out French villes, marinas, freight yards, mountains, churches, and jet skis will put American readers where they like to be—above the French. Mayle's economical text is an arch accompaniment: ``One of the features of rural France is the manner in which the farmer shows his disapproval of the way the world is going...there is always something to upset him, and he often takes his revenge in messy and spectacular fashion. He dumps. He dumps melons on the steps of the Mairie, he dumps potatoes on the autoroute, he dumps cherries in the village fountain or, as he has done here, he dumps tomatoes on the banks of the Durance.'' The photo that accompanies this tribute to Gallic gall is quite spectacular, for, by a trick of perspective, the tomatoes, in varying stages of ripeness and color, look like a carnival of fungus climbing a rock.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43564-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Intriguing and fact-filled study of the history and future of parenting.
A unique approach to gender and parenting roles uses scientific studies to evaluate the value of the mother as primary caregiver.
The price women pay and the sacrifices they make by assuming (and continuing to assume) the role of primary parent is too high, says Carlsson, who takes a fresh look at male and female gender issues by studying the corresponding dependence women incur when acting as primary parent. Women’s role as the primary caregiver has been questioned before, but here the author takes a deeper look into the issue by asking whether both mother and child might benefit more by stepping out of this construct. Carlsson uses numerous scientific studies to illustrate how, by acting as primary parent, women are hindered in their personal and professional growth. She argues this most forcefully with references to evolution and the comparison of animal behaviors to those of humans. Using numerous case studies, Carlsson evaluates men, their past traditional and more modern roles in childcare and its effect on women, children and the family as a whole. One question she addresses is whether men and women think differently or are simply trained differently. Although the author maintains that the debate over nature vs. nurture remains open, she uses numerous resources to argue that child, mother and family as a whole are hurt by gender-based parenting roles. Animal behaviors, and the subsequent evolutionary roles women have assumed, are the core of the discussion here against women as primary parent. As long as they are so, Carlsson says, they remain dependent on the male benefactor. With the dissolution of the primary-vs.-secondary standard, evolution will continue and thus eliminate this gender-based infraction against women’s independence and growth.
Intriguing and fact-filled study of the history and future of parenting.Pub Date: March 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-978-7388-6176-0
Page Count: 170
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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