Ordinary medicine : extraordinary treatments, longer lives, and where to draw the line / Sharon R. Kaufman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kaufman, Sharon R.

Series:

Critical global health.

Critical global health

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical care--United States.

Medical care.

Medical ethics--United States.

Medical ethics.

Medical care, Cost of--United States.

Medical care, Cost of.

Longevity--United States.

Longevity.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (pages).

Place of Publication:

Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2015.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Diagnosing Twenty-First-Century health care

The quandary and unexamined ordinariness of Twenty-First-Century medicine

Ordinary medicine in our aging society: the dilemma of longevity

The chain of health care drivers

The medical-industrial complex I: evidence-based medicine, the biomedical

Economy, and the ascendance of clinical trials

The medical-industrial complex II: access, industry, and the clinical trials

Phenomenon

"Reimbursement is critical for everything": medicare and the ethics of managing life

Medicine's changing means and ends

Standard and necessary treatments: the changing means and ends of technology

Family matters: kidneys and new forms of care

Influencing the character of the future: prognosis, risk, and time left

For whose benefit? Our shared quandary

Toward a new social contract?.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8223-7550-8

OCLC:

1139835747