How Doctors Think - Jerome Groopman M.D.

How Doctors Think is a grouping of interviews with doctors across the country in varying fields. They talk about patients with whom they've had success and patients whom they've failed. They discuss what they do right and what they do wrong with the hopes of teaching new doctors to be better critical thinkers, patients to be better informed, and let all of us out there know medicine is an imperfect science and things don't always work out perfectly.

On the Five Star Scale

Readability (*****) - 336 pages. Interesting read.

Final notes (*****) - You know I got this book for selfish reasons. I wanted to have a little extra clue into what was going on in the mind of Dr. J. Three things hit me right away. First, this book was just as much for Dr. J as for anyone else. Here are seasoned doctors saying, "gee after 25 years this is what I wish I would have known, or these are the red flags I keep for myself to prevent me from making mistakes". Which is why I spent most of this book saying, "honey, listen to this." So if you know someone who is a doctor or in med school this may be a perfect gift for them. I also realized this would have been helpful to read before that whole nasty appendicitis thing happened. Maybe then I could have said to the ER doctor. Yes I realize that you think I have swollen lymph nodes but just saying these things sometimes happens is not good enough for me. Lets do the scan and then we can talk. It might have saved me that whole appendix bursting and having to have a drain hanging out my body for a week. YUCK! Thirdly this really is just a great book on decision making and critical thinking and it is INTERESTING. Not dull like a text book, so hopefully you will enjoy like I did.