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33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

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I’ve recommended this book to so many and my parents have read this as a result (and also loved it)! I am interested in how modern medicine seems to have lost its way especially with excessive investigation and treatment of the very frail and elderly close to the end of their natural lives. A mixture of reminiscences drawn from the author's family life and a long medical career and reflections on how to deal with death and dying. He is a clinician, teacher, examiner and former medical manager with extensive experience of frailty, death and dying and the modern world’s failure to confront the realities.

It presents a cogent argument for an alternative approach to the end of life from the one that has seen us sacrifice quality of years for quantity. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It is a very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family. Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death.I have a plan in the end and won't be left suffering more needlessly because of lacking a NDR directive. It’s fantastic - every chapter left me reflecting on my own life, what I would like for the people I love and what I hope my children will experience. And I loathe fish, can't eat lamb and must steer clear of certain other foods that make my skin itch.

I want everyone at the age of seventy to discuss and document what medical interventions they would be willing to accept over their next decade or so of life. Bursting with empathy, common sense and humour, would that we could all be so fortunate as to have the author at our bedside when the time comes. Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. Old age and the end of life are things that we need to prepare for and discuss with our family members. No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home.

Jarrett explains how we can ensure that our last years are comfortable and not a burden to us, the health care system and, most importantly, our loved ones. David Jarrett's 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. David Jarrett’s 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share.

This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying. I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life. But my observation is that iliving to an old age - a slow death - is as bad as the author describes. I am happy to talk on end of life decisions in the elderly, dementia prevention, the history of stroke disease, biological ageing or other topics covered in 33 Meditation on Death.Too much medicine and too little helping people and their families gain a realistic vision of old age and dying. I am still working, albeit part time, as a consultant geriatrician and stroke physician on the south coast of England. I work in the NHS myself in psychology and really liked the author’s musings on how much society might over-medicalise or over-treat. My cynical side thinks it’s because keeping an old patient alive generates way more money for the medical community.

I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go. How else will my caregivers (when I'm old and gaga) know I want a glass of Aussie Chardonnay at 7pm every evening.

If a doctor can perform an abortion or transgender operation I don’t understand why a patient can’t request an end of life assist. This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy.

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