The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care through the End of Life

A doctor on the front lines of hospital care illuminates one of the most important and controversial social issues of our time.

It is harder to die in this country than ever before. Though the vast majority of Americans would prefer to die at home—which hospice care provides—many of us spend our last days fearful and in pain in a healthcare system ruled by high-tech procedures and a philosophy to “fight disease and illness at all cost.”

Dr. Ira Byock, one of the foremost palliative-care phy...