A doctor examines the causes behind medical errors and how to minimize them.
Ofri is a clinical professor at NYU School of Medicine who has also treated patients at Bellevue Hospital for more than 20 years, and her popular books about medicine and the doctor-patient relationship include What Doctors Feel and What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear. In her latest, she combines extensive research with stories of patients who have been harmed and enhances the narrative with details of her own disconcerting experiences as a clinician. What makes this book special is Ofri’s perceptive and compassionate nature; she sees her own patients as real people and is candid with readers about her concerns and vulnerabilities. The heart of the narrative focuses on the cases of two patients who died while being hospitalized—one with leukemia and one with severe burns. Through Ofri’s research, it becomes clear that poor communication and technology played roles in their deaths. Sandwiched between accounts of the specifics of the medical care of these two men, the author looks broadly at errors in diagnosis, biases, malpractice suits, unsafe working conditions, impossible workloads, malfunctioning technology, and the impact of electronic medical records. Patients, of course, expect zero errors in their medical care; however, in our modern health care system, notes the author, a more realistic goal is not perfection but harm reduction. She recommends revamping the system to make it less possible for people to commit errors, and she lays out the concept of a necessary culture shift. In the final chapter, Ofri provides examples of what that shift would entail and some of the problems it would encounter. For patients, the author has a number of practical recommendations: Make sure every medical professional who touches you washes their hands; take your pill bottles with you; ask questions and take notes; and, if possible, have another person with you.
Thorough analysis of a challenging problem executed with a personal touch that makes it highly readable.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3788-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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