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Overview
This book looks squarely at how patients can make crucial decisions and take charge of the end of their lives. This book is a resource for anyone who fears unnecessary suffering and excessive medical intervention at that point. It helps readers think through and then complete advance directives, and also to take a more active role when they or a family member becomes terminally ill. Through real-life stories and his own experience, Dr. Quill explores what measures a patient can choose to prolong life and how to forgo such measures if they begin to extend a painful death, choosing instead approaches such as comfort care which emphasize quality more than quantity of life. Finally, Dr. Quill speaks out on physician-assisted suicide and why he helped a long-term patient of his, stricken with leukemia, to take her life when her suffering became intolerable. He asks for regulation, rather than denial, knowing that many patients and doctors ofen face this question at times of crisis.
Hippocratic Oath & care of the dying/ compassion and conflicting responsibilities/etc.
Synopsis
"For me Dr. Quill is a hero—a physician with a head and a heart." —Betty Rollin, author of Last Wish
Publishers Weekly
A University of Rochester professor of medicine and psychiatry and former medical director of a hospice, Quill contends that the care of people with terminal illnesses is among the ``highest callings'' of physicians. But, he argues, medical institutions as well as the legal system wrongly limit the choices available to such patients. Unsentimentally relating stories from his own practice and those of colleagues, Quill explains the various options afforded by living wills, health care proxies and ``comfort care'' (treatment limited to alleviating patient suffering). While he avers that ``I would be willing to fight substantial medical battles to continue living,'' Quill defines certain circumstances under which a rational patient should have the right to choose death and to enlist the aid of a physician to ensure ``death with dignity.'' Quill's perceptive, empathetic exploration will help readers to make informed decisions in tragic situations. (Mar.)