Medical Care of the Soul: A Practical and Healing Guide to End-of-Life Issues for Families, Patients, and Healthcare Providers
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By accepting the inevitability of death--our own, or that of a loved one or patient--we take control of however many days or years remain, and we become empowered to fill this time with dignity and love. Medical Care of the Soul is for all of us who are facing death, or will someday die. We all will be there, but few of us admit it to ourselves. A doctor who constantly questions his own role in preserving life at any cost, Bruce Bartlow has written a pragmatic guide to making the full spectrum of end-of-life decisions. He stresses the importance of pre-determining the quality of life we wish to hold onto in our last days, and of committing those determinations to writing (and includes a wealth of forms to be used for that purpose). His instructions include practical steps we can take to arrange the end of life, and what roles each participant can play, including a full integration of healthcare providers, families and patients. All come to an individual's death seeking their own healing, and all have the ability to heal themselves and the others. In teaching us how to face death, Medical Care of the Soul is more a guidebook for living than for dying. By envisioning our own death from the soul's perspective, each of us can transform what remains of this life. We can choose to see the awareness of death not as a terrible loss, but as the last, loudest call to discover what we came here to do. The sooner we make this shift, the more time and clarity we will have to achieve our deepest goals and fill the last of life with loving resolution. Bruce Bartlow has devoted years to care of the poor and neglected, not just in this country but in others. He is as much a humanist as a scientist and part of what makes this book remarkable is his ability to make empathic connections with patients and colleagues. Medical Care of the Soul offers a structured approach to fulfilling the "soul" or deep essential healing needed at the end of life, bringing to our last days the opportunities for depth and sacredness.
AcknowledgmentsIXPart 1The Source1When Death Changes Everything3Part 2On Troubled Waters2Arranging the Last of Your Life153What Needs to Be Considered?214Advance Directives and Other Confusions275Who Needs to Participate, and How?576Into the Darkness: Discussing the End of Life757Finding the Way Home: Conflicts and Their Resolution85Part 3A Stone in the River8Technology, Slayer of the Soul: Our Struggle to Deny the Soul's Message1079When Society's Soul Speaks: Damning the Patient12310The Illusion of Cure: Hoping to Escape13911Shall We Do Everything ... or Nothing?14512The Descent: By the Road of Tears Will We Find Our Way to Healing151Part 4The River Runs Through Us13Medical Care of the Soul16314The Soul's Calling: Illness as the Way In16715The Soul as Individual: I Will Pass This Way Only Once19116The Soul as Eternal Being: What I Came Here to Learn20717The Soul as Legacy: Beneath the Stones, These Words22518The Soul as Manifestation of the "One": We All Come to Be Healed243Part 5Completing the Journey19As I Lay Dying: Completing Life Through Illness and Death25520The Healer's Path271Bibliography273Source Notes277Index279
