Being Mortal

By Atul Gawande

Highly recommended for those caring for ageing or sick loved ones, or yourself on how to navigate these last laps we all face at some point. It provides a powerful framework to help in the thinking and communications with wisdom and compassion. The advice in priceless.

Dr. Gawande is highly critical of the way physicians are trained. Knowledge is one thing, wisdom a very different one. He excels here. An advocate for hospice care, he also delves in policy issues. There was a clear attempt to bring some of these ideas into the last serious policy effort that was the doomed Affordable Care Act.

The book took me back to last year’s research while assembling a small healthcare fund. Somehow, I could trace Dr. Gawande’s fingerprints in several of the papers I went through at the time. It reminds us how dysfunctional and expensive the healthcare system is in the USA, in some cases, more than twice than that of other developed nations. It is easy to understand why the last policy effort failed to address the underlying causes.

But the advice at the personal level are powerful, humane and compassionate.