Hola a todos, mis queridos amigos.

It´s really a pleasure for me introduce a book that for sure we will give much to talk about:

  

 
Dr. Samuel Brown is the autor. He is Assistant Professor, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Medical Ethics and Humanities at University of Utah School of Medicine and the director of Center for Humanizing Critical Care. We were talking about this place just a year ago, and during this time we have became friends and collaborators. Humanizing the care is a matter of everybody.

This is a little summary:

“Among all the other cultural creations of the 1960s, two bear a particular relationship to the way we die: hospital intensive care units and living wills. Medicine created an unprecedented new world, in which once-fatal diseases were cured and once-quiet deaths were loudly interrupted. Intensive care units routinely produce medical miracles, saving lives that were once beyond anyone’s capacity to heal. But, paradoxically, these places of physical healing have come to be seen as ruining death for many people even as expensive medical treatments threatened to bankrupt the nation.

To be fair, medicine deserves some of the skepticism aimed at it. Physicians have a long history of putting their values above those of patients, while treating patients and families as children. And many people do experience miserable deaths, driven in part by relentless medical technology and physician failures of communication.

Living wills, introduced in 1969, attempted to keep physicians from running amok. Unfortunately, they did so in ways that aren’t faithful to who we are as human beings. They create static, confusing statements about hypothetical preferences that almost never apply in practice. And they leave people with the impression that actual communication has taken place. Living wills don’t take advantage of good research on the ways human beings process information and make decisions, and they distract from more important conversations about how best to support and guide patients through life-threatening illness. Seeing through dogma about living wills as well as the current poor state of human intensive care units, Brown outlines a new approach to intensive care specifically and life-threatening illness generally. This new practice acknowledges the conflicting emotions we have when talking about the possibility of death and emphasizes the ways that living wills inadvertently have effects that are often opposite what they intend.

A medical researcher, practicing intensive care physician, and historian, Brown turns a sympathetically skeptical eye on the practices of his profession. Talking about inevitable tradeoffs and the importance of careful honesty, Brown lays out a blueprint for a humane ICU that actually responds to the needs of patients and families in a kind of manifesto for reform in the ICU.”

 
We are just waiting our copy and from the IC-HU project, we wish the best of luck in this adventure to Dr. Brown.

Many thanks Sam.

Happy Wednesday,
Gabi