book review: The Caregiver's Bookshelf: Dying by Degrees - NYTimes.com

The Caregiver's Bookshelf: Dying by Degrees - NYTimes.com
  
The Caregiver’s Bookshelf: Dying by Degrees

By PAULA SPAN

 

Ira Byock has been writing books about the way Americans die since 1998, when he published “Dying Well.” For most of that time, he has been appalled.

He still is. Dr. Byock, director of palliative medicine at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., pulls no punches in his new book, “The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life.” The American way of dying, he points out, involves too much suffering for both patients and families, and routinized medical response with not enough individualized care. It means not enough listening, not enough support for families, way too much expense. “A national disgrace,” the author calls it in his introduction..........