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Features of Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF
Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF-For readers of Being Mortal and Modern Death, an ICU and Palliative Care specialist offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level
In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die.
Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care—to become an ICU physician—and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice.
Extreme Measures charts Zitter’s journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another—a doctor who prioritizes the patient’s values and preferences in an environment where the default choice is the extreme use of technology. In our current medical culture, the old and the ill are put on what she terms the End-of-Life Conveyor belt. They are intubated, catheterized, and even shelved away in care facilities to suffer their final days alone, confused, and often in pain. In her work Zitter has learned what patients fear more than death itself: the prospect of dying badly. She builds bridges between patients and caregivers, formulates plans to allay patients’ pain and anxiety, and enlists the support of loved ones so that life can end well, even beautifully.
Filled with rich patient stories that make a compelling medical narrative, Extreme Measures enlarges the national conversation as it thoughtfully and compassionately examines an experience that defines being human.
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Description of Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF
Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF is one of the best medical books for students and for emergency medical doctors . It is a must download.
The Authors
After two decades of caring for critically ill patients, Jessica Nutik Zitter, MD, MPH is a strong advocate for a new approach to caring for the dying. She practices the unusual combination of ICU and palliative care medicine at Highland Hospital, the county hospital in Oakland, California. Having herself participated in the default and indiscriminate use of technology with the dying and witnessed the resultant suffering, Dr. Zitter has come to view this situation as a public health crisis. She is committed to reorienting our care of the dying to a more collaborative process whereby the patient, rather than her organ or disease, is the primary focus of care.
Dr. Zitter’s first book, Extreme Measures, Finding A Better Path to the End of Life, (Avery, an imprint of Penguin-Random House, Spring 2017), offers an insider’s view of intensive care in America and its impact on how we die. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other publications. In 2005 she co-founded Vital Decisions, a telephone counseling service for patients with life-limiting illnesses.
Her work is featured in the Oscar nominated documentary, “Extremis,” available on Netflix. This vérité film follows Jessica, her team and several patients and their families in the intensive care unit at Highland Hospital.
Dr. Zitter attended Stanford University and Case Western Reserve University Medical School and earned her Master of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Her medical training includes an Internal Medicine residency at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a fellowship in Pulmonary/Critical Care at the University of California, San Francisco.
More information and relevant resources are available at jessicazitter.com
Dimensions and Characteristics of Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF
- Identification Number : B01KGZVQOM
- Publisher : Avery; 1st edition (February 21, 2017)
- Publication date : February 21, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 4192 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Print length : 348 pages
- Page numbers source International Standard Book Number : 0525533419
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Book Name : Extreme Measures Finding a Better Path to the End of Life PDF
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Top reviews
Null “I had placed this book on my wish list. I was sure I should read it. I was not sure I wanted to read it. Without divulging my own history, allow me to say that I am a lifelong skeptic in so far as the value of medical treatment for any but the most common human conditions. At the same time I have the highest respect for the sacrifices made by nurses and physicians. In the end, I clicked on the wrong button and ended up with a complete copy in my Kindle.
The first time I attempted to read it the early history of author and ancestors caused buyers remorse. The second time I started with chapter 2 and was immediately engrossed. That was because it validated nearly all my firmly held convictions about just how badly so many people end their lives in the ICU. Please consider that living in Brazil and traveling in much of latin america opened my eyes to pain, suffering, and death many years ago. Inflicting it in the ICU seems much worse, however.
My parents are deceased. In the ten years following the death of one, management of death had improved remarkably for the other. With the passage of death with dignity here in Colorado, I see a glimmer of hope that death may come to be viewed as merely the end of life. For many it will merely become a release without the fears of anguish so frequently dispensed in the ICU.”
H. W. Taeusch “Who’d want to die in an ICU? Not many of us. Dr. Zitter is a rare hybrid–an ICU physician also trained in palliative care for dying patients. Some say this is an oxymoron she writes. In a well-written book, she’s chosen cases that illustrate, case by case, the the incredible variety of things that can get screwed up by the innate avoidance by all of us, patients and medical staff, who avoid talking about death, especially at times when the subject must be talked about. And she shows, not tells, us how to go about these situations, not only in general, but also in all of the specifics.
This book is accessible, interesting, dramatic, really not macabre, and espouses the notion that death is an inevitable part of all of our lives. Obvious, but the cases illustrate the extraordinary effort we use to avoid the obvious. That brings to mind another book on the subject with a great title, A Beginner’s Guide to the End. We beginners thank you, Dr. Z.”
newtonian “Outstanding! Extreme Measures arrived at my door on Friday, I started it Saturday evening, and finished it Sunday afternoon. Replete with personal anecdotes and stories from a career that has spanned more than 20 years, Dr. Zitter succeeds in exploring and revealing the complexities, moral and ethical, of end-of-life care in twenty-first century America. As she so thoughtfully and compassionately points out, striving for a good death is no less important than fiercely fighting to help those who may recover, once the point has been reached where cure is no longer possible and the costs of delaying the inevitable are measured in dehumanizing and often unbearable suffering for patient and family alike.
Dr. Zitter is a very gifted writer, but more importantly: She shows herself to be the physician any of us would want caring for ourselves or for our loved ones in our hour of need.”
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