"Deciding how we ought to die is a subject that frightens most of us and leaves not a few unable to even enter into a discussion about it much less plan for our own mortality. If you fit this description, then you need to keep a copy of Embracing Our Mortality close at hand. Lawrence Schneiderman has the experience and the wisdom tomake you think and, more importantly, make you act."—Arthur Caplan, PhD, Emanual & Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics Chair, Department of Medical Ethics, and Director, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania
"Medicine has never had greater powers to cure disease, yet the same treatments that promote life in one case only prolong dying in another. This conundrum leads Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman to pose one of the essential ethical questions of contemporary medicine, What should we do now? Using case studies from his practice and cases of public notoriety (such as the Schiavo case), he provides the reader not only a wealth of facts, but also social, psychological, and spiritual insight into how some run from while others embrace mortality."—Robert L. Fine, MD, Director of Clinical Ethics, Baylor Health Care System, Houston
"A physician who is a playwright envisions his patients in the nuanced script of their lives. Dr. Schneiderman, who is indeed both, places the medical facts of drugs, operations, and statistics into human dramas of hope, anger, despair, and empathy pervading every encounter with a patient who is a person."—Albert R. Jonsen, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Ethics in Medicine, University of Washington; Senior Ethics Scholar, California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco
"A passionate, story-rich reaffirmation that the practice of medicine is about caring for human persons whose natural history includes getting sick, getting well, flourishing, failing, and ultimately dying."—Lance K. Stell, PhD, FACFE, Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy, and Director, Medical Humanities Program, Davidson College; Vice-Chair, Ethics Committee and Director, Ethics Consult Service, Carolinas Medical Center
"This book is engaging...The honest and realistic information is a welcome alternative to the inaccurate depictions of the end of life provided by the media."—Doody's, a 5 star review
"Embracing Our Mortality is an eclectic collection of essays, some previously published, focusing broadly on end of life issues, advance directives and futility, then concluding with Schneiderman's take on the problems of our current healthcare system...While one may disagree with him on specifics, he has picked out some of the better current ideas for reparairing the system....These are complex issues, and he might actually supply better long-term answers than many of our politicians..."—Ethics and Medicine
As medical advances and lifestyle changes carry more and more Americans beyond the age of 80, decisions about quality of life and manner of death grow increasingly unavoidable. Schneiderman (Univ. of California at San Diego Medical Sch.) and geriatrician McCullough (The Little Black Book of Geriatrics ) remind us that the issues surrounding decline and death are not isolated, spectacular events happening to others, as in the Terri Schiavo case, but a part of all our lives. Here, they each discuss the need for advanced planning and thoughtful communication and care.
Schneiderman emphasizes the need for clear and current advance directives to balance the tendency of modern medicine, abetted by hopeful loved ones, to continue treatments to the detriment of the patient's comfort. Using many literary references (this M.D. is also a novelist, a short story writer, and a playwright) and calling on philosophy as well as science, Schneiderman argues that physicians need to work from an "ethic of care" that gives equal status to the relief of suffering and the restoration of health.
McCullough's concept of "slow medicine" is an example of that ethic of care in action. Having worked through these issues himself with his own mother's death, he here guides families as they move with an aging relative along what he calls the "eight stations of late life" preceding death. McCullough believes communication at this time is essential, and he emphasizes gentle, low-impact, and thoughtful care from the first signs of the body or mind's decline. Often, he points out, elderly patients can benefit more from attentive listening, conversation, touch, and a reduction in medications than fromacute interventions. Good additions to such works as Ira Byock's Dying Well , both these books are recommended for public libraries.-Dick Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver
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