Diagnosis: Dispatches From The Frontlines Of Medical Mysteries (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
As a medical scientist, and someone just generally into medical anything, this book seemed like an obvious choice. The "Every Patient Tells a Story" sounds like House, MD in a book format. SIGN ME UP! Unfortunately, uh, there are hardly any patient stories. This is one long book on the benefits of the physical exam. Sure the author throw us a bone here and there, in the form of a very brief patient case, then followed by yet another 50 pages about the physical exam and 10 more pages full of statistics about how doctors don't know how to use a stethoscope. I don't even disagree with the doctor, everything she says is true, but it's just so monotonous. I would recommend this to any health care professional who performs (or should be performing) physical exams on patients. Anyone else: skip it or borrow it so you can skim through to read the few interesting sections without feeling like you wasted your money. This book is about diagnostic shortcomings in modern medicine. The focus is on examples of illnesses that require one-on-one physical exams to diagnose rather than pulling data from a test result. It's a reminder that observation is a skill that needs to be developed and honed. Sanders quotes Sherlock Holmes who said "I have trained myself to notice what I see." Though most of us are not in a field where mistakes can be deadly, in the rush to get products out may we not forget to train ourselves seek out abnormality and chew on it long enough to figure it out. This book is a fast read, with examples that read like a script for the TV show "House".
What do You think about Diagnosis: Dispatches From The Frontlines Of Medical Mysteries (2009)?
