How Doctors ThinkOn average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together. |
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abnormal Alter Anne Dodge Anne Dodge’s arthroscopy asked atrium baby baby’s Bigby biopsy bone marrow bowel Brad breath called cancer cardiac catheter cause chemotherapy chest x-ray child chondrocalcinosis cians clinical clinician cognitive errors Croskerry CT scan cysts decisions Delgado diagnosis disease disorder doctors think drug ECMO estrogen examination eyes Falchuk feel felt fluid hand heart hematologist hormone hospital images infection internist irritable bowel syndrome Kressel learned left atrium Lock looked low back pain lunate bones lungs lymphoma mammogram McEvoy medical school menopause mind missed Morgan MRI scan Nimer normal nurse oncologist Orwig oxygen patients pediatrician percent physi physical physician pneumonia pressure problem procedure pulmonary question Rachel radiologists Redelmeier resident SCID Shira showed specialist spine surgeon surgery symptoms synovium Tepler testosterone therapy tients tion told treat treatment tumor uncertainty ventricle woman women wrong
Popular passages
Page 130 - If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
Page 219 - Reports that have come out in the last few weeks in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association show definite IQ patterns associated with very low levels, levels that at one time were thought to be nontoxic.
Page 58 - One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.
Page 137 - Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard, for I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application, so that one was bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her.
Page 147 - The blood returns from the lungs via the pulmonary veins to the left side of the heart, which pumps it, via the aorta, to the arteries in the rest of the body.
Page 234 - Neurology ; a fellow of the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association, and a member of the American Neurological Association.
Page 279 - How much longer must medicine's science be bound by a seventeenth-century world view?
Page 157 - Physicians' denial of awareness of uncertainty serves similar purposes: it makes matters seem clearer, more understandable, and more certain than they are; it makes action possible. There are limits to living with uncertainty. It can paralyze action. This is particularly true, as John Dewey noted, in practical affairs, as in the practice of medicine, where decisions must be made. He chided his fellow-philosophers on their futile quest for certainty to obtain relief from the tremendous insecurities...