"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker that caused her...

"An ICU and Palliative Care specialist featured in the Netflix documentary Extremis offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die. Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care--to become an ICU physician--and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the...

Frontline teams up with writer and surgeon Atul Gawande to examine how doctors care for terminally ill patients. In conjunction with Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, the film explores the relationships between doctors and patients nearing the end of life, and shows how many doctors, including himself, struggle to talk honestly and openly.

"We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors, and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive...

"Up to the 1970s, most Americans died swiftly: of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, or in accidents. But in the past three decades, medical advances have extended our lives and changed the way we die. Journalist Kiernan reveals the disconnect between how patients want to live the end of life--pain-free, functioning mentally and physically, surrounded by family and friends--and how the medical system continues to treat the dying--with extreme interventions,...

This innovative care program blends nursing care and meaningful activities to promote peaceful and relaxing end-of-life experiences for older adults with late-stage dementia. The first program created specifically for this hardest-to-serve population, Namaste care also meets the latest regulatory guidelines for person-centered activity programming. With this practical guide, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living settings, memory care communities,...

"The slow violence being inflicted on our environment-through everything from carbon emissions to plastic pollution-also represents an impending public health catastrophe. Yet standard healthcare practices are more concerned with short-term outcomes than long-term sustainability. Every resource used to deliver medical care, from IV tubes to antibiotics to electricity, has a significant environmental impact. This raises an urgent ethical dilemma: in...

"...Finish Strong is for those of us who want an end-of-life experience to match the life we've enjoyed. We know we should prepare, but are unsure how to think and talk about it, how to live true to our values and priorities, and how to make our wishes stick. The usual advice about advance directives and conversations is important but woefully inadequate. This book describes concrete action in the here and now to help live our best lives to the end....