This very readable book helps you learn medicine through true stories of patients' medical symptoms, and will help you understand what your body is trying to tell you when you are sick. Calling your doctor won't help you when you don't understand your symptoms correctly since doctors make diagnoses based on how patients describe their symptoms. Knowing common heart attack symptoms won't help you when you can't recognize the subtle feeling in your chest. The twenty true medical stories cover most organ systems and represent the majority of diseases and conditions that are seen in most acute-care hospitals in the U.S. Each story describes how a patient felt at the onset of symptoms and connects it to what actually happened inside the organs. This book offers the insight you need to help get a diagnosis quickly at a critical time when every second counts.
Can you adapt to the wide variety of learning environments in medicine? Can you show your best abilities in the exams at the same time as learning to be a doctor? Can you balance your studies with an enjoyable social life? Can you develop your professionalism and manage your 'digital footprint'? How to Succeed at Medical School will help you learn these vital skills, and much more. Written by experienced medical school teachers and packed full of case studies, illustrations, quotes from other students, tip boxes, exercises, portfolios and learning techniques to help you communicate, study and revise - it’s an essential resource to help you thrive at medical school. This thoroughly updated second edition includes new chapters on Professionalism and Teaching, and provides invaluable insight into what to expect from the start of medical school right through to the start of your medical career.
“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.
Dennis, the son of Chinese immigrants, yearns to play video games like his friends and, upon his strict father's death, becomes obsessed with them but later, realizing how his father sacrificed for him, he chooses a nobler path.
Becoming a Doctors' Doctor is author and psychiatrist Michael F. Myers' revelation of the fascinating and sometimes tragic encounters with doctors as patients. Physicians are expected to be resilient and to carry the burdens of others. But all too often, the on-the-job stresses can result in mental illness. Beginning with his roommate's suicide in the first year of medical school, Myers found himself craving to learn more about physicians and their vulnerabilities. In this memoir of his thirty-five year career, Myers shares vignettes of treating doctors for depression, alcoholism, burnout, and more. He reveals the stigma physicians face when asking for help and the struggles they endure while keeping others healthy and safe. A psychiatrist with a passion for helping physicians, Myers highlights the importance of mental health treatment for doctors and the social and emotional costs of serving the community. Beautifully written, Becoming a Doctors' Doctor heralds the many patients to whom he has devoted his practice and career.
The first medical specialty selection guide written by residents for students! Provides an inside look at the issues surrounding medical specialty selection, blending first-hand knowledge with useful facts and statistics, such as salary information, employment data, and match statistics. Focuses on all the major specialties and features firsthand portrayals of each by current residents. Also includes a guide to personality characteristics that are predominate with practitioners of each specialty. “A terrific mixture of objective information as well as factual data make this book an easy, informative, and interesting read.” --Review from a 4th year Medical Student
On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.
The essential guide by one of America's leading doctors to how digital technology enables all of us to take charge of our health A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours until you hear "the doctor will see you now"-but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system. The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment." Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best." Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations. There's no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the result-better, cheaper, and more human health care-will be worth it. Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is, for all of us.
This book established itself in its first edition as the definitive 'one-stop-shop' revision aid; the only one available to encompass all elements of the MRCOG Part 2 examination in a single volume. Now incorporating practice EMQs as well as the standard question types, this second edition will ensure that it retains its place on the 'must-have' list for every candidate preparing for this exam. Concentrating on testing the candidate's theoretical and practical knowledge as recommended in the current MRCOG syllabus, the book tests the trainee with questions in obstetrics and gynaecology and those aspects of medicine, surgery and paediatrics relevant to the practice of both. The book is divided into four key parts, one for each style of question, each of which opens with an introductory section on how to approach the exam and, crucially, how to fail it. # Part 1 provides a series of short answer practice papers. Common mistakes are highlighted as well as a list of key points required to get full marks. A sample answer is given for each question # Part 2 contains a mock paper for the MCQ part of the exam, containing 225 questions with answers and helpful annotations # Part 3 introduces the EMQ, giving the reader 40 questions in the style of the examination, together with answers and explanatory notes # Part 4 is devoted to the OSCE, with descriptions of 20 sample stations assessing different aspects of clinical practice, advice on how to tackle these, and suggested marking schemes. Throughout, questions have been designed to test factual knowledge and understanding, problem-solving ability, and clinical and communication skills.
