My whole life I have heard it said that if you have a disease you look for and use the cure or treatment that has been most effective with cases similar to yours. You would never hear of someone giving up their life and not even trying to overcome what was coming their way. In Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, he expresses how doctors today are now beginning to focus more on how patients want to spend the rest of their lives no matter what the diagnosis is, if in a state of needing to make a major medical decision. Gawande starts the novel off about how we expect and are known for dying. For example any type of cancer, or illness we can develop throughout our lifetime, not just at old age. He tells us how through his own experiences with medical …show more content…
Something that I was not aware of before reading this book is that “Gawande revealed that doctor’s don't just routinely get it wrong — when asked to predict how long a terminally ill patient has to live, they overestimate on average by a factor of five” (Francis, par. 9). This was a piece taken from a book review in The Guardian on Gawande’s novel, by Gavin Francis. Gawande uncovered the truth about the estimations of how long a patient has until their time of death. It amazes me how with our technology and education in the recent years has not flourish enough to make extremely accurate estimates of how long a patient will live. The need for this understanding is so important for decision making on different treatments. Whether the doctor says 6 months or 2 years, is extremely valuable information to have when making life or death treatment decisions. Also, the difference in times can also be filled with false hope because they may feel they are starting to overcome their illness because they are lasting longer than predicted, but in reality the estimation was wrong and they are only let to be disappointed. Hopefully after this truth has been revealed, there will be a bigger effort to be made to create more accurate estimations on the life span of all