A revealing and stirring directive aiming to heal medicine from the inside out.
A career physician ponders the positive and negative aspects of how health care reform is transforming the delivery of care and the medical profession itself.
Nussbaum’s (The Pocket Guide to the DSM-5 Diagnostic Exam, 2013) passionate appeal for the “renewal of medicine” stems from his clinical career and psychiatry directorship at Denver Health and the many incarnations he’s embodied there as a patient, educator, student, and ethicist. Clinical professionals view health care reform as a “series of competing initiatives,” and the author cleverly equates it to sailing at sea following an unmarked course of undetermined duration rather than a “well-organized race” toward the goal of cost-efficient, effective, quality care. Nussbaum begins with memories of his time in medical school, clinical residency, and his early career as a physician, when he learned, however detachedly, “to see people as a compendium of parts and a source of income” and to step back to view modern health care through the lens of both the everyday consumer and caregiver alike. He relates wonderfully to an esteemed array of medical intellectuals such as disheartened doctor Abraham Verghese, who advocated for the integration of heart into health care. Nussbaum also relates prophetic metaphors of Canadian physician Sir William Osler and the proposals of radical health pioneer Archibald Cochrane. Nussbaum even considers noted surgeon and public health advocate Atul Gawande’s suggestion of boosting generalized health care’s productivity by using the Cheesecake Factory’s operational business model. Particularly striking is the author’s keen if underdeveloped commentary on the medical marijuana conundrum, which begs for further introspection. In sharing the many tribulations of real-life patients and physicians, Nussbaum unveils a thoughtful, well-rounded, yet thorny vision of the current state of medicine. His generous narrative offers clarity and direction on how the industry can avoid sacrificing humanity to the trappings of an industrialized, unsympathetic, automated version of health care.
A revealing and stirring directive aiming to heal medicine from the inside out.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-21140-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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