Confession - I haven't read this book. I've only just ordered it. But it from the reviews I've devoured, didn't want to dawdle in sharing it. To my thinking, it's the best sort of book on aging, written by someone who gives as much respect & weight to subjective anecdotal information as objective scientific findings.
For now, here's the blurb from its Amazon listing, which says in relatively few words the same thing I've read in various reviews:
Thanks to advances in science and medicine,
our parents are living longer than ever before. But our health-care
system doesn't perform as well when decline eventually sets in. We want
to do our best as our loved ones face new complications—more diseases
and disabilities—demanding further need for support and careful
judgment, but the choices we have to make can seem overwhelming.
Family doctor and geriatrician Dennis McCullough recommends a new approach: Slow Medicine. Shaped by common sense and kindness, it advocates for careful anticipatory "attending" to an elder's changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—thereby improving the quality of elders' extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. This is not a plan for preparing for death; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years.
Family doctor and geriatrician Dennis McCullough recommends a new approach: Slow Medicine. Shaped by common sense and kindness, it advocates for careful anticipatory "attending" to an elder's changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—thereby improving the quality of elders' extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. This is not a plan for preparing for death; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years.
And from Dr. McCullough's website:
Dennis McCullough, M.D.,
has been an "in-the-trenches" family physician and geriatrician for
30 years. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and
serves as a faculty member in the Department of Community and Family Medicine
at Dartmouth Medical School. He is a member of the American Geriatrics Society,
the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Society of Teachers of Family
Medicine, and the American Medical Directors Association, as well as the
coauthor of The Little Black Book of Geriatrics. He lives with his wife,
the poet Pamela Harrison, in Norwich, VT.
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