In this podcast, dr. Sebastian Rushworth talks to dr. Seamus O’Mahony about his three books and what motivated him to write them.
Seamus O’Mahony is an Irish physician who’s written a trilogy of books that explore the varied ways in which modern medicine is broken.
The first book, “The way we die now” (4), discusses how the movement of death in to hospitals in the modern era and a culture of denial around mortality has resulted in horrendous overtreatment of dying patients up until the very moment of death, which robs them and their families of the chance to say goodbye and experience the “good death” that everyone hopes for but few are able to experience.
The second book, “Can medicine be cured?”, showcases how medicine has come to be dominated by vested interests and perverse incentives, from medical research that has been corrupted by pharmaceutical companies and a metric driven culture that causes medical scientists to produce an endless stream of useless papers, to hospitals that are run like factories, in which any value that can’t be quantified in numbers and measured is ignored.
The third book, “The ministry of bodies”, is a sort of diary, which showcases just how inhumane modern healthcare has become, towards both healthcare staff and patients (and somehow manages to make you laugh at the same time).