Death and Dying

A simple, little book about the US healthcare system, it is part of the death-positive movement which encourages conversations around death and views it as a natural part of life without its avoidance. This book argues for honest conversations when people are expected to die so that they could plan their exit better and not delay palliative therapy or hospice. They should be mentioned earlier so that the patients could arrive at them sooner and not die at the hands of strangers. It discusses how death became a more of a public spectacle rather than an individual endeavour, the way it became more of a business rather than something experienced in the privacy of one's home. Doctors trained with cadavers and fed pure information without many courses on empathy and care if any at all usually provide little help comforting their patients. A lot of money goes into healthcare, but it's distributed badly and a trillion of it went to total waste.

Disappointingly despite it mentioning corruptive and profit driven incentives from the pharma industries, it doesn't mention nutrition at all despite veganism being able to treat a lot of the diseases mentioned without the need for the people to die prematurely.

I expected this to have different subject matter and lean more into death itself rather than the medicine side of things, this is the only MIT book that the library had, I did not know what to expect. I feel like I am lately collecting information about all sorts of death, other, outcast movements. It feels good to accept the void this way by collecting this pure information and combining it. A lot of these movements could use the other movements help because a lot of them are related and build on each other. This reminded me of antinatalism since death aid was mentioned and how it should be offered to patients because even if they don't use it it makes them feel that they are more in control of themselves and their destiny, it reduces needless helplessness.

I feel like there are way worse problems out there, but it is definitely not nice how we treat people about to die and this should be one of the things that society should care more about. The author provides a personal experience with death and explains how you can treat a patient with information and yet view them compassionately and care for them as a fellow human being at the same time.