Doctored The Disillusionment Of An American Physician

In his acclaimed memoir Intern, Sandeep Jauhar chronicled the formative years of his residency at a prestigious New York City hospital. Doctored, his harrowing follow-up, observes the crisis of American medicine through the eyes of an attending cardiologist. Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Jauhar accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower. Blatant cronyism determines patient referrals, corporate ties distort medical decisions, and unnecessary tests are routinely performed in order to generate income. Meanwhile, a single patient in Jauhar's hospital might see fifteen specialists in one stay and still fail to receive a full picture of his actual condition. Provoked by his unsettling experiences, Jauhar has written an introspective memoir that is also an impassioned plea for reform. With American medicine at a crossroads, Doctored is the important work of a writer unafraid to challenge the establishment and incite controversy.

The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tick For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker—by accident. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family’s history of heart ailments and the patients he’s treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.

&Lsquo;I Was An Intern A Decade Ago Now, But I Still Remember It The Way Soldiers Remember War.&Rsquo; Intern Is Sandeep Jauhar&Rsquo;S Story Of His Days And Nights In Residency At A Busy Hospital In New York City, A Trial That Led Him To Question Every Assumption About Medical Care Today. Residency&Mdash;And Especially The First Year, Called Internship&Mdash;Is Legendary For Its Brutality. Working Eighty Hours Or More Per Week, Most New Doctors Spend Their First Year Asking Themselves Why They Wanted To Be Doctors In The First Place. &Nbsp; Jauhar&Rsquo;S Internship Was Even More Harrowing Than Most: He Switched From Physics To Medicine In Order To Follow A More Humane Calling&Mdash;Only To Find That Medicine Put Patients&Rsquo; Concerns Last. He Struggled To Find A Place Among Squadrons Of Cocky Residents And Doctors. He Challenged The Practices Of The Internship In The New York Times, Attracting The Suspicions Of The Medical Bureaucracy. Then, Suddenly Stricken, He Became A Patient Himself&Mdash;And Came To See That Today&Rsquo;S High-Tech, High-Pressure Medicine Can Be A Humane Science After All. Now A Thriving Cardiologist, Jauhar Has All The Qualities You&Rsquo;D Want In Your Own Doctor: Expertise, Insight, A Feel For The Human Factor, A Sense Of Humor, And A Keen Awareness Of The Worries That We All Have In Common. His Beautifully Written Memoir Explains The Inner Workings Of Modern Medicine With Rare Candor And Insight. Reviews &Lsquo;A Sensitive, Thoughtful Observer And An Experienced, Gifted Writer . . . It Will Be The Standard By Which Future Such Memoirs Will Be Judged&Rsquo; &Mdash;Abraham Verghese, Author Of My Own Country &Lsquo;In A Voice Of Profound Honesty And Intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar Gives Us An Insider&Rsquo;S Look At The Medical Profession, And Also A Dramatic Account Of The Psychological Challenges Of Early Adulthood&Rsquo; &Mdash;Akhil Sharma, Author Of An Obedient Father

The essential guide by one of America's leading doctors to how digital technology enables all of us to take charge of our health A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours until you hear "the doctor will see you now"-but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system. The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment." Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best." Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations. There's no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the result-better, cheaper, and more human health care-will be worth it. Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is, for all of us.

"Patients and doctors alike are keenly aware that the medical world is in the midst of great change. We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This compelling, thoughtful book is the response of a practicing physician who explains how population-based reforms are diminishing the relationship between doctor and patients, to the detriment of both. As an antidote to stubbornly held traditions, Dr. Abraham M. Nussbaum suggests ways that doctors and patients can learn what it means to be ill and to seek medical assistance. Drawing on personal stories, validated studies, and neglected history, the author develops a series of metaphors to explore a doctor's role in different healthcare reform scenarios: scientist, technician, author, gardener, teacher, servant, and witness. Each role shapes what physicians see when they encounter a patient. Dr. Nussbaum cautions that true healthcare reform can happen only when those who practice medicine can see, and be seen by, their patients as fellow creatures. His memoir makes a hopeful appeal for change, and his insights reveal the direction that change must take."--Jacket flap.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP TEN NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK SELECTION • A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK SELECTION One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

Presents a narrative analysis of the federal budget that reveals how funds were actually spent in 2011, evaluating the roles of such contributors as Jacob Lew, Douglas Elmendorf, and Pete Peterson.

In this inspiring book, based on her twenty years of research, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. DeSalvo shows how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won't help you; in fact, there's abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging. DeSalvo's program is based on the best available and most recent scientific studies about the efficacy of using writing as a restorative tool. With insight and wit, she illuminates how writers, from Virginia Woolf to Henry Miller to Audre Lorde to Isabel Allende, have been transformed by the writing process. Writing as a Way of Healing includes valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inspire both experienced and beginning writers.