ChelseaRoss Books DOWNLOAD Ordinary Medicine Extraordinary Treatment | Page 3

Description
Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging
society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to
see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical
industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman
investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly
invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary
treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to
hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears,
and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories
anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every
American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own
ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health
care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.
Book Details
Author : Sharon R. Kaufman
Pages : 336
ISBN : 0822358883
Language :