What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical ProgressThe focus of this work by Daniel Callahan is individualism vs the good of the community as played out on the wards of American medicine. He is concerned about a runaway health care caused by the excessive expectations and demands of given patients to restore and maintain health, an aging population that dominates this claim, and a proliferation of medical science and technology that fuels the pursuit of health but never quite satisfies it. He warns that if these activities are unchecked, increasingly we will sacrifice other important social goods. He questions the wisdom of this quest for medical progress and the inordinate place of maintaining health in our scale of individual and social values. He sees these problems as inadequately addressed by developing new schemes to reorganize health services; by reining in the profits of physicians, health care institutions, or manufacturers of technology; or by the myriad other regulatory. |
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What kind of life: the limits of medical progress
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictCallahan, medical ethicist, co-founder of the Hastings Center, and author of Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (o.p.), makes a complex and largely logic-based argument here for the rationing of ... Read full review
Contents
Preface | 9 |
Transforming Healthcare | 17 |
Needs Endless Needs | 31 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
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Common terms and phrases
accept achieve adequate allowing American answer aspirations assessment basic become believe benefit better body bring burden caring choice claim common containment costs cultural curative cure death decisions demand desire determine developed direction disease economic effective efficiency efforts elderly euthanasia expectations expenditures expensive fail failure force function future give goal groups healthcare system hope human idea important improved increase individual need institutions interest issue Journal killing kind less limits live look means medical progress medicine meet moral nature necessary organ pain patients percent person physicians political possible powerful present Press principle priority problem programs proposals question reason relatively require seek sense simply social society standards success suffering sufficient suggest treatment understand United University values
Bibliographic information
| Title | What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress A Touchstone book |
| Author | Daniel Callahan |
| Publisher | Simon and Schuster, 1990 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | Jul 30, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0671670964, 9780671670962 |
| Length | 318 pages |
| Subjects | › Philosophy / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |