A Case for Slower Medicine
Anger is an understandable reaction to a system that dehumanizes patients, that treats bodies as containers of billable ailments and broken parts. But most doctors go about their daily work with good intention – to heal.
Summer Reading: Island Practice, About A Rare Physician on Nantucket
This book probes the relationships formed when a doctor is immersed in his community. There are few secrets.
Reading Toms River
The residents hadn’t a clue what was happening to their water. Fagin, an environmental journalist, wades through a half century of dumping, denial, Greenpeace efforts to expose the situation, local citizens’ mixed responses…
Finding Kindness and Introspection in ‘Half Empty,’ a Book of Essays by David Rakoff
the words we use matter enormously, not just in clinical outcomes, but in how people with cancer feel about the decisions they’ve made, years later.
Reading and Hearing ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’
This slim 1956 novel by Mark Harris, oddly elegant in its tenderness and guyish language, resonates today.
Notes on the Social History of American Medicine, Self Reliance and Health Care, Today
…a bit on the history of health care in the United States. The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by Paul Starr, was first published in 1982. The author, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, gives a fascinating, still-relevant account…
Reading Between the Lines, and Learning from an Epidemiologist
She writes: “I believe that every educated person must at the very least understand how these interpreters of medical knowledge examine, or should examine, it to arrive at the conclusions.”
Review: Dr. Eric Topol’s Creative Destruction of Medicine
Topol’s comfortable writing about the intersection of science and medicine as few physicians are….One theme that emerges through the book is the capacity for technology – by “knowing” and processing so much real-time information about each person’s condition – to inform more effective, individualized treatments.
Notes, on Running a Hospital and ‘Goal Play’
“Goal Play!” articulates how positive, team-oriented guidance and genuine concern for employees’ well-being can have a positive impact on the lives and careers of valued health care workers and their patients.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Narrative of Cancer History and Ideas
This week I finished reading the Emperor of All Maladies, the 2010 “biography” of cancer by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The author, a medical oncologist and researcher now at Columbia University, provides a detailed account of malignancies – and how physicians and scientists have understood and approached a myriad of tumors – through history. The encyclopedic, […]