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

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Too much medicine and too little helping people and their families gain a realistic vision of old age and dying. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go.

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. No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. 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. This book reinforces all the things that we suspect about ageing which none of us really wants to own.

This book will be helpful to anyone with ageing parents or people like myself who are old but not yet elderly. 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. 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. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end.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. A refrain throughout the book is: "Just because a treatment can be given does not mean it should be given. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome. But my observation is that iliving to an old age - a slow death - is as bad as the author describes. I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on.