Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine . Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals. “Medical anthropologist Kaufman bravely delves into the heartbreaking predicament of modern medicine: ‘getting the medicine we wish for but then having to live with the unsettling and far-ranging consequences.’ … Kaufman is at her best when focusing on the heartbreaking dilemma of patients dealing with the consequences of ordinary medicine, such as an elderly patient who must choose between lifesaving treatments or palliative care, facing repeated hospital visits regardless of the choice. Kaufman calls for no less than making the ethics of medicine the ‘preeminent topic of our national conversation about health care reform.’” ― Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) “What makes Kaufman's analysis distinctive is the way she demonstrates the effects of Medicare policy on treatment benefits—namely, if a patient on Medicare is eligible for treatment, providers are often willing to supply it. But the author notes that this way of thinking has led us to stop examining issues around quality of life, obligations to our families, and the inevitable prospect that we will die. Health-care professionals, students of medical ethics, and others interested in the actions that frame American medicine will find this a thought-provoking read." -- Aaron Klink ― Library Journal “If Gawande’s is the voice of comfort, and simple yet vital solutions, Sharon Kaufman’s brings her characteristic analytic and ethical precision, eschewing easy answers for an assessment of the structural density of our current predicament. Anyone who has read her earlier book on end-of-life care in American hospitals, And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life , will be familiar with her tremendous ability to narrate the ambiguities of American medicine as it unfolds on the ground via the stories of people who are caught up in its contradictions.” -- Julie Livingston ― Public Books "This provocative, engrossing book will make a valuable addition to undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, sociology, public health, and public policy, including those in medical anthropology and sociology, science and technology studies, bioethics, the nature of U.S. health care, aging and dying, and visions of personhood and the life course. Beyond the classroom, the book should also be read by physicians, health care policymakers, medical ethicists, and an educated public wishing to rethink and renew medicine’s goals." -- Sarah Lamb ― Medical Anthropology Quarterly "The elegant part of Kaufman’s analysis—of a kind maybe only a sharp-eyed anthropologist with a wide lens can provide—concerns the way we all become unwitting victims of the chain, wrapped tightly around us.... Is there any good news here? Yes, Sharon Kaufman has written a wonderful, necessary, and readable book, and that is a start." -- Daniel Callahan ― Hastings Center Report "Fascinating.... The book is written in a lucid and highly readable style, case studies of patients bringing the ‘health care system’ vividly alive through thick description.... The ethical dilemmas, small and large simultaneously, gripped me such that on two consecutive readings I found myself sitting up late into the night unable to put it down."   -- Susan Pickard ― Social History of Medicine "Kaufman delivers a haunting and provocative meditation on the peculiarly American obsession with highly technologized longevity. Through a combination of historical analyses of debates in health policy and health economics, bioethical argumentation, and powerful ethnographic examples, Kaufman meticulously demonstrates the rise over the past few decades of what she calls ordinary medicine.... Kaufman’s book constitutes an important and troubling addition to current bioethical debates on health financing and the distribution of medical resources. At its heart, this book seems