Atul Gawande in his book “Letting Go” is trying to point out a medical system that is not effective in caring for the needs of patients who are terminally ill and approaching death. He writes that these patients can be placed under hospice and palliative care and end up living better and quality lives, even longer than what was expected. According to Gawande, this is a better choice than struggling to find means to stay alive when all means have been exhausted and there's no hope left. We should know when to let go. Gawande gives us the experiences of a few terminally ill individuals receiving different forms of treatment. Among those was Sarah Monopoli's touching story. She was diagnosed with an inoperable lung cancer while she was pregnant. Her long battle against this disease and trying to survive led her to trying many different types of aggressive treatments which left her weaker and more prone to infections. Although her wish was to die at home and not in the hospital, she ended dying in the hospital where she went to seek treatment for pneumonia. At last when she was in the hospital, her family decided to bring her suffering to an end and stopped medical intervention. Through her treatments, she suffered greatly …show more content…
Patients who were hospital bound were receiving medical treatments had a much lower quality of life. That means focusing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter (Gawande, 2010). Improving the quality of life for terminally ill patients also reduces the cost of dying by avoiding expensive ER visits or being admitted in ICU and not being able to get any