The knowledge provided in this book is both comforting and powerful. Patients who know their right to refuse treatment and the legal ways to bring about death if pain or distress cannot be alleviated will be spared the frightening helplessness that can rob their last days of meaning and connection. Drs. Wanzer and Glenmullen do not shy from controversy. They make clear what patients should expect of their doctors, including the right to enough pain...

Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Gawande asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

'You sing your songs and maybe you go for a walk or a beer, but at some point your brain must remind you that your audience is back there dying.' From the author of The Marriage Hearse, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and The Handsome Sailor, a New York Times Notable Book, comes a new novel that explores the little-known world of hospice singing--home visit concerts for the dying--through the surprising relationship between one of the...

At Death's Door: End of Life Stories from the Bedside tells the powerful story of Sebastian Sepulveda's experiences in working with patients at the end of their lives. In some cases, death came quickly, after the patient was first diagnosed with a terminal condition and entered the hospital. In other cases, patients had a long, progressive illness that got increasingly worse over the months or years until they were in their final days. In some cases,...

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives--what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically...

At what point can treatment for teminally ill patients be stopped? Do individuals have a right to die? How can people cope with death?Is death the end of life? Questions covered in this book.