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Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Lineby Sharon R. KaufmanEnglish | ISBN: 0822359022, 0822358883 | 2015 | 352 pages | PDF | 1 MBMost of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see–it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In “Ordinary Medicine” Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor “Ordinary Medicine.” Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals. Editorial Reviews”Sharon R. Kaufman has made an important and disturbing discovery about the links between for-profit healthcare companies, so-called evidence-based medicine, doctors, and patients. Ordinary Medicine should be read, thought about, and acted upon by those who have the power to effect change.” (Victoria Sweet, author of God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine)”I devoured Ordinary Medicine. It gave me courage. It helped me delineate, sometimes for the first time, the interlocking forces and practices that have helped create an epidemic of unnecessary suffering at the end of life. Breathtaking in its scope, rigor, and intellectual range, this book will help readers take back control of their lives and deaths from the forces that have created an ‘ordinary’ end-of-life medicine that is far from ordinary.”(Katy Butler, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death)”Ordinary Medicine is an exploration of how what is essentially experimental medicine can become ‘standard care.’  In this thoroughly researched book, many of our assumptions are shaken. The system that is extant would seem aligned to prevent us from accepting death as a natural life progression and offering in its place prolonged suffering. A truly engaging and provocative read.”(Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone)”The recommendation by the AMA to Medicare to begin paying physicians for discussions with patients about end-of-life care makes this new book by Sharon Kaufman particularly timely. She explains why the present health care system is biased toward excess treatment at the end of life, and advocates a broad approach to health care reforms that goes beyond cost control to encompass social and ethical considerations.”(Victor R. Fuchs, author of How We Live)“Medical anthropologist Kaufman bravely delves into the heartbreaking predicament of modern medicine: ‘getting the medicine we wish for but then having to live with the unsettling and far-ranging consequences.’ … Kaufman is at her best when focusing on the heartbreaking dilemma of patients dealing with the consequences of ordinary medicine, such as an elderly patient who must choose between lifesaving treatments or palliative care, facing repeated hospital visits regardless of the choice. Kaufman calls for no less than making the ethics of medicine the ‘preeminent topic of our national conversation about health care reform.’”(Publishers Weekly)“What makes Kaufman’s analysis distinctive is the way she demonstrates the effects of Medicare policy on treatment benefits—namely, if a patient on Medicare is eligible for treatment, providers are often willing to supply it. But the author notes that this way of thinking has led us to stop examining issues around quality of life, obligations to our families, and the inevitable prospect that we will die. Health-care professionals, students of medical ethics, and others interested in the actions that frame American medicine will find this a thought-provoking read.”(Aaron Klink Library Journal (Starred Review) 2014-05-01)“If Gawande’s is the voice of comfort, and simple yet vital solutions, Sharon Kaufman’s brings her characteristic analytic and ethical precision, eschewing easy answers for an assessment of the structural density of our current predicament. Anyone who has read her earlier book on end-of-life care in American hospitals, And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life, will be familiar with her tremendous ability to narrate the ambiguities of American medicine as it unfolds on the ground via the stories of people who are caught up in its contradictions.”(Julie Livingston Public Books 2015-06-02)”The elegant part of Kaufman’s analysis—of a kind maybe only a sharp-eyed anthropologist with a wide lens can provide—concerns the way we all become unwitting victims of the chain, wrapped tightly around us…. Is there any good news here? Yes, Sharon Kaufman has written a wonderful, necessary, and readable book, and that is a start.”(Daniel Callahan Hastings Center Report 2016-04-01)”This provocative, engrossing book will make a valuable addition to undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, sociology, public health, and public policy, including those in medical anthropology and sociology, science and technology studies, bioethics, the nature of U.S. health care, aging and dying, and visions of personhood and the life course. Beyond the classroom, the book should also be read by physicians, health care policymakers, medical ethicists, and an educated public wishing to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.”(Sarah Lamb Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2015-11-01)About the AuthorSharon R. Kaufman is Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of …And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.