How Your Surgeon Feels

In the vast array and vitriol of our National Health debate, the doctor's voice, especially that of the surgeon, is rarely solicited, and seldom heard . It is mostly the clamor of patients you hear or the rancor of politicians . This compendium of lifetime essays will restitute an imbalance that is long overdue . The collection speaks to how a practicing surgeon really feels about the vital medical issues of our day, and what needs to be done to improve his life's work and his dedicated care for his patients . American medicine is at a desperate crossroads where the qualitative health of ourselves and our beloved country have arrived at critical mass . Herewith a rare insider's insights, with unadulterated answers . .......

In the vast array and vitriol of our National Health debate , the doctors voice , especially that of the surgeon , is rarely solicited , and seldom heard . It is mostly the clamor of patients you hear or the rancor of politicians . This compendium of lifetime essays will restitute an imbalance that is long overdue . The collection speaks to how a practicing surgeon really feels about the vital medical issues of our day , and what needs to be done to improve his lifes work and his dedicated care for his patients . American medicine is at a desperate crossroads where the qualitative health of ourselves and our beloved country have arrived at critical mass . Herewith a rare insiders insights , with unadulterated answers . .

A look at the emotional side of medicine—the shame, fear, anger, anxiety, empathy, and even love that affect patient care Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice have a profound impact on medical care. And while much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. In What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri has taken on the task of dissecting the hidden emotional responses of doctors, and how these directly influence patients. How do the stresses of medical life—from paperwork to grueling hours to lawsuits to facing death—affect the medical care that doctors can offer their patients? Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions—shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love—that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection. Drawing on scientific studies, including some surprising research, Dr. Danielle Ofri offers up an unflinching look at the impact of emotions on health care. With her renowned eye for dramatic detail, Dr. Ofri takes us into the swirling heart of patient care, telling stories of caregivers caught up and occasionally torn down by the whirlwind life of doctoring. She admits to the humiliation of an error that nearly killed one of her patients and her forever fear of making another. She mourns when a beloved patient is denied a heart transplant. She tells the riveting stories of an intern traumatized when she is forced to let a newborn die in her arms, and of a doctor whose daily glass of wine to handle the frustrations of the ER escalates into a destructive addiction. But doctors don’t only feel fear, grief, and frustration. Ofri also reveals that doctors tell bad jokes about “toxic sock syndrome,” cope through gallows humor, find hope in impossible situations, and surrender to ecstatic happiness when they triumph over illness. The stories here reveal the undeniable truth that emotions have a distinct effect on how doctors care for their patients. For both clinicians and patients, understanding what doctors feel can make all the difference in giving and getting the best medical care.

In the vast array and vitriol of our National Health debate , the doctor's voice , especially that of the surgeon , is rarely solicited , and seldom heard . It is mostly the clamor of patients you hear or the rancor of politicians . This compendium of lifetime essays will restitute an imbalance that is long overdue . The collection speaks to how a practicing surgeon really feels about the vital medical issues of our day , and what needs to be done to improve his life's work and his dedicated care for his patients . American medicine is at a desperate crossroads where the qualitative health of ourselves and our beloved country have arrived at critical mass . Herewith a rare insider's insights , with unadulterated answers . .

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

A proposal that extends the enactive approach developed in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to issues in affective science. In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

It is the thirty-third century, and mankind has begun to colonise the solar system. With the development of cold fusion, he has even spread beyond the planets around Sol and reached the Star Proxima, although not without any unforeseen problems and setbacks. Yet though man has advanced technologically, he is still the same marred creature that he ever was. Conflict exists between different sovereignties, competitive companies, and the ever-present battle of the sexes. Though he has come so far since ancient times, he is still essentially capable of making the errors that he always did, but in new and fantastic ways and with new and ever more advanced devices. Then there is the problem of the androids and of course the Biotron! Here are twelve glimpses into the possible future created by one writers twisted imagination.