A Matter of Choice

My friend, I’ll call her Anna, is dying today. She was dying yesterday, too, and tomorrow she’ll be even closer to death than today. That’s true of all of us, I suppose, but she’s on the fast track: Her gut is so clogged up with cancer that there’s nothing left to do for her but […]

Motherhood: A postscript

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a post about my struggle to decide whether to have a child. Now I have one — a wriggling, screaming bundle of chub and cheeks. She is wonderful. She is awful. She defies description. Until four months ago, I could not have imagined how it would be, […]

The myth of choice in medicine

I’m probably not the only one who has noticed a shift in the way we talk about health care these days. It’s no longer about patients taking the advice of their doctors. It’s about “consumers” making “choices” about care. We’re shifting away from the old model of medicine, in which doctors guided medical decisions because […]