Notable Books

America spends a big percentage of its healthcare dollars caring for people in the last months of their lives, yet the treatment requires many of the elderly to be hooked up to machines and trapped in impersonal hospitals. Doctors are quick to offer one more intervention even though it is unlikely to prolong life, and patients hope that the next intervention will be the one that makes them better. In this thoughtful and well-written book, Atul Gawande understands that many Americans would like to spend their last days among loved ones. He writes about his patients and his father to examine the way modern medicine deals with death and terminal illness.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

Also written by an Indian-American, Doctored discusses some of the same issues as Being Mortal—but Jauhar, a hospital cardiologist on Long Island, focuses on the perverse incentives built into our system. Those incentives reward doctors financially when they prescribe procedures, not when they help patients get well. Jauhar weaves his own story into his reporting: He shows himself turning into the kind of doctor he swore he’d never be, and he shows the callousness with which many doctors treat their patients. The book ends on a more positive note, but most of the way offers a depressing picture of the state of modern medical care.

Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories

Holt draws from his experiences as a doctor to tell “parables” about modern medicine. He uses mash-ups of patients and doctors he’s known. The result: a collection of moving stories about a young doctor and the patients he confronts as he moves through different rotations. Perhaps it’s due to the Southern setting (in contrast to Boston and Long Island), but Holt’s patients and some of the other doctors think a lot about God and what He’s doing through illness. You get a fine sense of the limits of man’s knowledge and the mysteries that surround life and death.

Wellness for the Glory of God

Dunlop addresses ways we can improve our well-being as we age and avoid some of the problems described in the books above. He offers chapters showing how older people can increase their physical, mental, social, financial, spiritual, and emotional wellness: It’s all basic, but many do not want to think about the basics of growing old. Dunlop gives good advice about weight management, recommends brisk walking or similar exercise, and proposes that we go easy on medications when lifestyle changes could do the job. He reminds us to ask God to bless medicines to our body as we ask Him to bless food.

Spotlight

What’s the connection between religion and physical health? Harold Koenig’s Medicine, Religion, and Health (Templeton Press, 2008) cites numerous studies showing that religious belief and observance lead to better health in many categories. For example, those who consider religion unimportant are three times more likely to binge drink than those who consider religion very important; all other things being equal, those who attend religious services at least once a week, and pray or study the Bible at least once a day, are 40 percent less likely to have hypertension.

Other studies: Weekly religious service attenders in 1965 were 36 percent less likely to be dead in 1994 than those who went less frequently. Among 21,000 adults, those who never attended religious services were 72 percent more likely to die during an 8-year period than those who attended more than once per week. (The researchers took into account education, income, activity limitations, health at the start, and days spent in bed.) —Marvin Olasky