Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine Is Complicating the Way We Die by Blair Bigham MD, Blair Bigham MD

Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine Is Complicating the Way We Die
Blair Bigham MD, Blair Bigham MD
Page: 304
Format: pdf, ePub, mobi, fb2
ISBN: 9781487008543
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine Is Complicating the Way We Die

Free electronic textbooks download Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine Is Complicating the Way We Die 9781487008543 CHM English version by Blair Bigham MD, Blair Bigham MD

Overview

In Death Interrupted, ICU doctor Blair Bigham shares his first-hand experiences of how medicine has complicated the way we die and offers a road map for dying in the modern era.

Doctors today can call on previously unimaginable technologies to help keep our bodies alive. In this new era, most organs can be kept from dying almost indefinitely by machines. But this unprecedented shift in end-of-life care has created a major crisis. In the widening grey zone between life and death, doctors fight with doctors, families feel pressured to make tough decisions about their loved ones, and lawyers are left to argue life-and-death cases in the courts. Meanwhile, intensive care patients are caught in purgatory, attached to machines and unable to speak for themselves.

In Death Interrupted, Dr. Blair Bigham seeks to help readers understand the options facing them at the end of their lives. Through conversations with end-of-life professionals — including ethicists, social workers, and nurses and doctors who practise palliative care — and observations from his own time working in ambulances, emergency rooms, and the ICU, Bigham exposes the tensions inherent in this new era of dying and answers the tough questions facing us all. Because now, for the first time in human history, we may be able to choose how our own story ends.

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