One-hundred fifty years after the Civil War, there are still untold stories. Over 11,000 surgeons served in the Union army; 10,400 were well behaved. The other 600 were in trouble for embezzlement, insubordination, rape, AWOL, desertion, surliness, stealing food, and a host of other misdeeds. One man was deemed, "Drunk, but not too drunk to operate." Another was hopping into the beds of women in the VD hospital. Yet another forged his own performance reports, reporting his own excellent character. A statistical study compares their incidence of malpractice with one of today's mid-West states.These remarkable stories are accompanied by full citations and are indexed by regiment. An eye-opener and a much-needed reference work.
Originally published in 2012, revised edition published in 2013, by Fourth Estate, Great Britain; Published in the United States in 2012, revised edition also, by Faber and Faber, Inc.
Cartoonist and doctor Ian Williams introduces us to the troubled life of Dr Iwan James, as all humanity, it seems, passes through his surgery door. Incontinent old ladies, men with eagle tattoos, traumatised widowers - Iwan's patients cause him both empathy and dismay, as he tries to do his best in a world of limited time and budgetary constraints, and in which there are no easy answers. His feelings for his partners also cause him grief: something more than friendship for the sympathetic Dr Lois Pritchard, and not a little frustration at the prankish and obstructive Dr Robert Smith. Iwan's cycling trips with his friend Arthur provide some welcome relief, but even the landscape is imbued with his patients' distress. As we explore the phantoms from Iwan's past, we too begin to feel compassion for The Bad Doctor, and ask what is the dividing line between patient and provider? Wry, comic, graphic, from the humdrum to the tragic, his patients' stories are the spokes that make Iwan's wheels go round in this humane and eloquently drawn account of a doctor's life.
A doctor removes the normal, healthy side of a patient's brain instead of the malignant tumor. A man whose leg is scheduled for amputation wakes up to find his healthy leg removed. These recent examples are part of a history of medical disasters and embarrassments as old as the profession itself. In Medical Blunders, Robert M. Youngson and Ian Schott have written the definitive account of medical mishap in modern and not-so- modern times. Youngson and Schott cover the gamut of medical accidents, from famous quacks to curious forms of sexual healing, from blunders with the brain to drugs worse than the diseases they are intended to treat. In Medical Blunders, we find shamefully dangerous doctors, human guinea pigs, masturbation treated as a disease requiring treatment, and the legendary surgeon who was himself a craven morphine addict. The resulting picture is one which depicts medical mistakes that are incredible, misguided, arrogant, cruel, or stupendously wrong-headed. Exploring the line between the comical and the tragic, the honest mistake and the intentional crime, Medical Blunders illustrates once and for all that doctors are subject to the same political, social, historical, and personal pressures as the rest of humanity.
In this controversial new account of the history of medicine, David Wootton argues that, from the fifth century BC until the 1930s, doctors actually did more harm than good, and asks just how much harm they still do today.
Discusses how to avoid harmful medical mistakes, offering advice on such topics as working with a busy doctor, communicating the full story of an illness, evaluating test risks, and obtaining a working diagnosis.
Most people would consider a knife wound to the stomach a serious health risk, but a similar scalpel wound in an operating room is often shrugged off. In Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs, Dr. Harvey Bigelsen explains how today’s medical doctors overprescribe surgery and ignore its long-term health implications. Any invasive medical procedure, he argues—including colonoscopies and root canals—creates inflammation in the body, leading to serious and long-lasting health problems. Inflammation, according to Dr. Bigelsen, is the real cause of all chronic disease (persistent or long-lasting illness). Noting that Western medicine has yet to “cure” a single chronic disease, Bigelsen points to a new paradigm: one that treats each patient as an individual (rather than as a set of symptoms), avoids further damage to the body through surgery, and looks for the root cause of chronic disease in past damage done to the patient’s body—whether caused by a bad fall or a scalpel. Provocatively written and radical in its approach, Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs challenges readers to rethink everything they believe about illness and how to treat it.
Mastering the "ART of Communication" is the theme and aim of this invaluable eBook! A must for becoming a loved clinician by your patients and enjoying a highly successful and fulfilling career in clinical Medicine. This eBook serves as a simple guide to essential Communication Styles for the most frequent patient-contact scenarios and clinical encounters. It is meant to be a “quick reference” guide. Reading through it should be quick and easy! Interested users may broaden their knowledge and understanding by exploring the literature on each specific topic. It will be most valuable to those front line clinicians in-training during their everyday routines whether in the medical wards, outpatient clinics, emergency rooms, etc. It will also be very useful for undergraduates, those sitting their clinical examinations e.g. OSCE, Long Case Presentations, etc. as well as faculty trainers and examiners. However, all healthcare professionals e.g. Pharmacists, Nurses, Social workers, etc. will also find it very beneficial.
“A fascinating journey into the heart and mind of a physician” that explores the doctor-patient relationship, the flaws in our health care system, and how doctors’ emotions impact medical care (Boston Globe) 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. 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 understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care. Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Dr. Danielle 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. Ofri offers up an unflinching look at the impact of emotions on health care. 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. 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. Ofri also reveals that doctors cope through gallows humor, find hope in impossible situations, and surrender to ecstatic happiness when they triumph over illness.
Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today. In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled “chronic complainers” for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to “normal” menstrual cramps, while still others have “contested” illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as “real” diseases by the whole of the profession. An eye-opening read for patients and health care providers alike, Doing Harm shows how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn’t trust their reports of their symptoms. The research community has neglected conditions that disproportionately affect women and paid little attention to biological differences between the sexes in everything from drug metabolism to the disease factors—even the symptoms of a heart attack. Meanwhile, a long history of viewing women as especially prone to “hysteria” reverberates to the present day, leaving women battling against a stereotype that they’re hypochondriacs whose ailments are likely to be “all in their heads.” Offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its sometimes catastrophic consequences, Doing Harm is a rallying wake-up call that will change the way we look at health care for women.
