Description

A New Yorker staff writer, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the ultimate medical mystery: how doctors figure out the best treatments -- or fail to do so.

Reviews:

• "Jerome Groopman has written a unique, important, and wonderful book about a central paradox of modern life: even though diagnosing an illness is often as much art as science, we want our doctors to speak with scientific surety. Groopman gives a rationalist's tour of the doctor's thought processes -- or lack thereof -- and yet, unlike many rationalists, he never veers toward cynicism. You'll never look at your own doctor in the same way again -- for better or worse."
  -Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of Freakonomics
  
  
• "I wish I had read this book when I was in medical school, and I'm glad I've read it now… I have never read elsewhere this kind of discussion of the ambiguities besetting the superspecialized—the doctors on whom the rest of us depend: "Specialization in medicine confers a false sense of certainty." Every reflective doctor will learn from this book—and every prospective patient will find thoughtful advice for communicating successfully in the medical setting and getting better care…This passionate honesty gives the book an immediacy and an eloquence that will resonate with anyone interested in medicine, science or the cruel beauties of those human endeavors which engage mortal stakes."
  -Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "A sage, humane prescription for medical practitioners and the people who depend on them."
  -O: The Oprah Magazine
  
  
• "In this splendid and courageous book, Dr. Jerome Groopman lifts the veil on possibly the most taboo topic in medicine: the pervasive nature of misdiagnosis. His engrossing narrative exposes all of the subtle mental traps---the snap judgments and stereotypical thinking, the premature conclusions and herd instinct---that dangerously narrow the vision of too many physicians."
  -Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton, Titan, and The House of Morgan
  
  
• "A cogent analysis of all the wrong ways his fellow practitioners are trained to approach the patients they treat.”
  -ELLE Magazine