Ordinary Medicine

Most of us want and expect medicines miracles to extend our lives. In todays aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to seeits 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 storms 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. Todays medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every Americans experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufmans careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicines goals.