Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly

· Black Inc.
Ebook
160
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

'The elderly, the frail are our society. They are our parents and grandparents, our carers and neighbours, and they are every one of us in the not-too-distant future. . . They are not a growing cost to be managed or a burden to be shifted or a horror to be hidden away, but people whose needs require us to change'

In Dear Life, using vivid and moving case studies, Karen Hitchcock show what care for the elderly and dying is really like - both the good and the bad. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions and over-treatment, frailty and dementia.

Throughout she argues against the creeping tendency to see the elderly as a 'burden' - difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous. We must plan for a future when more of us will be old, Hitchcock argues, with the aim of making that time better, not shorter. An we must change our institution and society to meet the needs of an ageing population. Dear Life is a landmark book by one of Australia's most powerful writers.

About the author

Dr Karen Hitchcock is a general physician whose clinical work has focused on pain, fatigue, medically unexplained symptoms and obesity. She holds a PhD in English and writes regular essays for The Monthly. She is the author of the Quarterly Essay Dear Life and the story collection Little White Slips, which won the Steele Rudd award in the 2010 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Hitchcock was one of the first authorised prescribers of medicinal cannabis in Australia.

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