To Die Well
Your Right to Comfort, Calm, and Choice in the Last Days of Life
By Sidney Wanzer, M.D. and Joseph Glenmullen, M.D.
Price: $24.00 / £14.50 / $29.00 CAN Published by Da Capo Press
Available wherever books are sold including Amazon.com. Orders may also be placed through the Publisher by calling 1-800-343-4499.
Description:
While every one of us hopes “to die well,” this may not be possible without knowing our rights about care at the end of life. How can futile medical treatment be stopped? When might death be hastened? How can each of us retain control of these decisions?
The information in To Die Well is both comforting and empowering. Knowing our rights to refuse treatment, as well as legal ways to bring about death if pain or distress cannot be alleviated, will spare us the frightening helplessness that can rob our last days of meaning and connection with others.
Drs. Sidney Wanzer and Joseph Glenmullen do not shy away from controversy. They make clear what patients should expect of their doctors, including the right to sufficient pain medication even if it shortens life. They distinguish between normal sadness and depression. They also explain the ways to hasten death that are legal and possible for anyone, and those that require a doctor’s help.
Appendices include current national and international end-of-life organizations, sample living wills, and Health Care Proxy.
Author Biographies:
Sidney Wanzer, M.D., nationally recognized authority on issues of death and dying, learned what did and did not work for end-of-life treatment in almost four decades of internal medicine, initially in private practice and later with the Harvard University Health Services. He was the lead author of the groundbreaking article in the New England Journal of Medicine which for the first time held that, in certain situations, it could be ethical for a physician to assist in hastening the death of patients suffering intolerably. Dr. Wanzer lives in Concord, Massachusetts, and has three grown children and six grandchildren.
Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is on the staff of Harvard University Health Services and in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His works include the widely praised Prozac Backlash and The Antidepressant Solution.
