The Best Care Possible

There is no palliative care physician for whom I have more respect and admiration than Ira Byock. In this strikingly important book, Byock presents an agenda for end-of-life care that should serve as an ideal template on which to build our best hopes for the final days of those we love and ourselves--and a corrective for our society. --Sherwin B. Nuland, MD, Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and author of How We Die <br> With elegance, compassion, and energy, Ira Byock shows us how to get the best end of life care. He is a great storyteller and a brilliant analyst of health care in America. This is the book to read or give, if you are facing this hard situation. Nobody gets out of this life alive, but Byock shows us how to do it elegantly and well. --Jane Isay, author of Walking on Eggshells <br> This is an extraordinary and wise book on how dying people can be cared for. Written by a master clinician, a man of great compassion, Ira Byock has a vision of health care that is brilliant and kind. --Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center, Sante Fe, author of Being with Dying <br> In a world in which politics are polarized and ethical discussions often descend into a food fight, Ira Byock is that rare doctor: a humane guide leading us with honesty and compassion through complex stories about living and dying well. He's a real-life rebuke to those who think palliative doctors are death panels and a mentor to every medical student inevitably faced with mortality. This is must reading for everyone trying to make humane decisions in a high tech world. --Ellen Goodman, longtime syndicated columnist for The Boston Globe <br> At a time when a long life can become a curse as readily as a blessing, this lucid and compassionate book points the way to more humane treatment of a life's last days. --Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People <br> The baby boom generation has transformed every stage ofr