Christine K. Cassel – författare

When the end of life makes its inevitable appearance, people should be able to expect reliable, humane, and effective caregiving. Yet too many dying people suffer unnecessarily. While an "overtreated" dying is feared, untreated pain or emotional abandonment are equally frightening.

Approaching Death reflects a wide-ranging effort to understand what we know about care at the end of life, what we have yet to learn, and what we know but do not adequately apply. It seeks to build understanding of what constitutes good care for the dying and offers recommendations to decisionmakers that address specific barriers to achieving good care.

This volume offers a profile of when, where, and how Americans die. It examines the dimensions of caring at the end of life:

Determining diagnosis and prognosis and communicating these to patient and family. Establishing clinical and personal goals. Matching physical, psychological, spiritual, and practical care strategies to the patient''s values and circumstances.

Approaching Death considers the dying experience in hospitals, nursing homes, and other settings and the role of interdisciplinary teams and managed care. It offers perspectives on quality measurement and improvement, the role of practice guidelines, cost concerns, and legal issues such as assisted suicide. The book proposes how health professionals can become better prepared to care well for those who are dying and to understand that these are not patients for whom "nothing can be done."

When the end of life makes its inevitable appearance, people should be able to expect reliable, humane, and effective caregiving. Yet too many dying people suffer unnecessarily. While an "overtreated" dying is feared, untreated pain or emotional abandonment are equally frightening.

Approaching Death reflects a wide-ranging effort to understand what we know about care at the end of life, what we have yet to learn, and what we know but do not adequately apply. It seeks to build understanding of what constitutes good care for the dying and offers recommendations to decisionmakers that address specific barriers to achieving good care.

This volume offers a profile of when, where, and how Americans die. It examines the dimensions of caring at the end of life:

Determining diagnosis and prognosis and communicating these to patient and family. Establishing clinical and personal goals. Matching physical, psychological, spiritual, and practical care strategies to the patient''s values and circumstances.

Approaching Death considers the dying experience in hospitals, nursing homes, and other settings and the role of interdisciplinary teams and managed care. It offers perspectives on quality measurement and improvement, the role of practice guidelines, cost concerns, and legal issues such as assisted suicide. The book proposes how health professionals can become better prepared to care well for those who are dying and to understand that these are not patients for whom "nothing can be done."

Since the publication of the third edition of Geriatric Medicine,extraordinary advances have occurred in the science of aging and the potential for biomedical research to give us answers to many, if not most, of the age-related disorders that threaten the quality of life in older years. At the most basic level, the successful mapping of the human genome was declared complete in the fall of 2000. Understanding the map of the human genome is as important as understanding the map of genomes of important laboratory species, ranging from the microscopic worms and fruit?ies used in most classic genetic studies to rodents such as laboratory mice, and eventually to primates, on which much of the research on the aging human brain is done. The genetic maps of all of these species,including our own,does not answer clinical questions,but it does open the door to dramatic, rapid, and ef?cient answers to questions about the genetic polymorphisms related to diseases in humans. The telomerase story also unfolded since the third edition. Telomerase is an enzyme responsible for maintaining the telomeres—the redundant DNA portions at the end of chromosomes—whose shortening seems to be linked directly to cell senescence,ap- tosis,and the control over cell death,which,at the level of the individual cell,seems to be linked to the decline of organ function and eventually aging and death within the org- ism.

A comprehensive and user-friendly reference for agingOne of the most daunting aspects of growing older is the torrent of advice we face about maintaining our physical health and our mental acuity. Entire books have been written on how to manage finances, how to avoid falls, how to care for aging parents. Yet, too often, the advice offered is overwhelmingly complicated or diffuse and difficult to locate precisely when it is needed most.In this comprehensive reference, authorities in their respective fields discuss topics such as the normal processes of aging, how laws affect the elderly, what forms of exercise are most beneficial at various stages of life, family issues, and more. Informative charts and graphs supplement the concise, accessible chapters, which are followed by a comprehensive listing of major national and regional organizations serving the elderly.Ideal as an upbeat, forward-looking gift or as a personal resource, The Practical Guide to Aging is a user-friendly book for young and old, a helpful guide regardless of age or circumstance.

A comprehensive and user-friendly reference for agingOne of the most daunting aspects of growing older is the torrent of advice we face about maintaining our physical health and our mental acuity. Entire books have been written on how to manage finances, how to avoid falls, how to care for aging parents. Yet, too often, the advice offered is overwhelmingly complicated or diffuse and difficult to locate precisely when it is needed most.In this comprehensive reference, authorities in their respective fields discuss topics such as the normal processes of aging, how laws affect the elderly, what forms of exercise are most beneficial at various stages of life, family issues, and more. Informative charts and graphs supplement the concise, accessible chapters, which are followed by a comprehensive listing of major national and regional organizations serving the elderly.Ideal as an upbeat, forward-looking gift or as a personal resource, The Practical Guide to Aging is a user-friendly book for young and old, a helpful guide regardless of age or circumstance.

Reorganized into a single, tightly focused volume, the new edition of Geriatric Medicine offers practical, authoritative, and comprehensive coverage of the diseases, common problems, and medical care of older persons. The thorough revision includes new chapters on "Urinary Incontinence" and "Falls" as well as expanded discussions of rheumatic/orthopedic disorders and neuropsychological testing. Particularly noteworthy is the superb chapter on "Dementia"; written by a neurologist and a psychiatrist, it provides a remarkably complete account of the dementing disorders. The book also reviews central issues in health care systems and policies, including the unique legal aspects of caring for older persons and the rising importance of home care.

The third edition of Geriatric Medicine appears at a crucial time for health profession­ als, a time when the values and goals of our overall American health care system are being reoriented to those values and goals that have long been at the core of geriatrics. It is likely that the readership of this highly respected textbook will be even substan­ tially greater than that for the two previous editions or, for that matter, for any other textbook on geriatric medicine published in the United States. This third edition continues what its predecessors began-the goal of closing the gap between our knowl­ edge of the proper care of older persons and our capacity to deliver that care. Numerous journal articles and forewords and prefaces to geriatrics textbooks claim that the field of geriatrics has matured. Geriatrics may have "matured" since the publication of the first edition of Geriatric Medicine in 1984, but the maturation process has been slow and is still incomplete. It is true that the field has advanced in many areas. It has been recognized as an area of added qualification by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Family Practice, and they have certified thousands of fully qualified physicians in geriatrics over the past decade.