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

“Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform.”
― John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World

“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