Grateful for a thoughtful Amazon review of Knocking on Heavens Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, from a reader in Bogota, Colombia. I think hes an MD. This is one of the best books Ive read this year. Its both a riveting memoir and a great piece of investigative reporting about the perversions of modern medicine. The main message of the book is disquieting: the perverse incentives of some modern health systems and the unintended consequences of technological change have completely transformed the way we die. For the worse. Many modern health systems incentivize aggressive and costly end-of-life treatments. Overtreatment has become the norm, with dire consequences. People no longer say their last words (they have a tube down their throats). Neither can they ponder about their own mortality (they are sedated). Less can they decide when enough is enough. On the other hand, technological change has been asymmetric, capable to slow down the deterioration of the body, but not of the mind. It has been more successful with the maintenance of the hardware than with the preservation of the software. In the words of Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner, We will, in effect, be creating a nation of demented, frozen people. Hardware without sofware. All of this has taken us to a moral conundrum. Its about time, this book tells us eloquently, to face up some inconvenient truths, to confront the unavoidable fact that for a growing number of people, it is not worth becoming what is left for them to become.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:03:15 +0000