Author(s): Nicole Piemonte; Shawn Abreu

Self Help

An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge instead death's existential and emotional realities.

Death is a natural, inevitable, and deeply human process, and yet Western medicine tends to view it as a medical failure. In their zeal to prevent death, physicians and hospitals often set patients and their families on a seemingly unstoppable trajectory toward medical interventions that may actually increase suffering at the end of life. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the medicalization of death and dying and proposes a different approach--one that acknowledges death's existential and emotional realities.