Lisa

“Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics, and the strategy requires that the nation pay geriatric specialists to teach rather than to provide patient care.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“we have no good metrics for a place’s success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he’s lonely.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“The burdens for today’s caregiver have actually increased from what they would have been a century ago.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End