News Hour with Jim Lehrer
Tuesday, May 15, 2007Visit the PBS News Hour website to listen to my recent interview discussing misdiagnosis.
NPR Interview
Wednesday, April 18, 2007Visit the KQED site to listen to a particularly intelligent and lively interview with Michael Krasny out in San Francisco.
Newsweek
Monday, April 16, 2007"In his long career, Groopman, whose research interests range from hematology and oncology to AIDS, has made his share of mistakes, and clearly learned from them. The number of ways in which a doctor can screw up make for uncomfortable reading: 'satisfaction of search,' the tendency to stop considering alternative explanations once you arrive at a plausible hypothesis; 'diagnosis momentum,' the unconscious suppression of evidence that conflicts with an existing theory; 'commission bias,' the preference for action for its own sake. Groopman has particular disdain for snap judgments and intuitive leaps not supported by rigorous logic. One of his heroes is a radiologist named Dennis Orwig, whose insistence on methodically tracing every loop and twist of intestine in an X-ray led him to a difficult diagnosis of a potentially fatal bowel condition."
Read the full Newsweek article here.
New York Times Book Review
Monday, April 2, 2007"This elegant, tough-minded book recounts stories about how doctors and patients interact with one other. In the hands of Jerome Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, these clinical episodes make absorbing reading and are often deeply affecting. At the same time, the author is commenting on some of the most profound problems facing modern medicine." -Michael Crichton
The rest of the article is located at the New York Times website.
Parade Magazine
Sunday, April 1, 2007Dr. Jerome Groopman, author of the new book How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin), says one key to avoid medical mistakes is for patients to become their doctor’s partner and to ask the questions that will help their doctor think better.
To read the full article, visit the Parade.com.
Wall Street Journal Q and A
Saturday, March 31, 2007The article is on the Wall Street Journal website.
New York Sun
Friday, March 30, 2007"Dr. Groopman, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a professor of medicine at Harvard, focuses on the different ways a doctor can go wrong. He tells heroic stories of laser-sharp diagnoses, but the errors in practice engage him more. In an absorbing chapter on cancer treatments, Dr. Groopman describes cases in which oncologists cleave closely to data on chemotherapy and refuse to customize care for individual patients. But he also cites doctors who believe any full assessment of a patient must factor in the individual's personality, goals, and history. While Dr. Groopman acknowledges that diverging from standard treatments can lead to unnecessary suffering, he also believes closing down those avenues deprives patients of real options and shows doctors to be overly anxious about failure."
Visit the New York Sun to read the whole article.
Freakonomics Blog
Wednesday, March 28, 2007Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner had some great things to say about How Doctors Think on their blog as well as another thoughtful doctor book that has recently come out, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Here's an excerpt from the post.
"So why do these doctors write so well, and so much better (to my mind, at least) than other non-writers? Perhaps there are elements of doctoring that lie in harmony with writing: peeling back the layers to get to the core of an issue; confronting the obvious but being willing to look beyond it; learning where to 'cut in,' of course; and, more than anything, recognizing that this object before you – in one case a human body, in the other a manuscript – is on a certain level a miraculous object with the power to astound, and on another level is a complex, dynamic system which can (and must be) reduced to a schematic, laid out on paper or x-ray film."
Daily News Q and A
Tuesday, March 27, 2007Excerpt from the interview:
"So what can patients do with their own doctors?
"There are three pillars of this. First, when the symptoms are not getting better, what else could it be? Could there be more than one thing going on? You need to ask this perfectly appropriate question to prompt revisiting the initial, anchored assumption, the working diagnosis.Second, patients know how their doctors feel about them — both warm, good feelings as well as irritation. If you're picking up vibes that are particularly negative, you need to broach that, and it's a perfectly fair thing to do. Say, 'I feel like we're not communicating well, I don't feel a sense of compatibility.' Sometimes, the doctor will say 'I'm sorry, I'm having a bad day,' but as I say in the book, when I ask colleagues who are physicians about when they went to a doctor who seemed dismissive and irritated, they said, 'I'm going to find someone else.' I think you have to take the emotional temperature of the doctor. The third key issue is: 'Is there any data that seems to contradict your assumption?' Because that's a really big cognitive error, this so-called commission bias, once you get anchored. This goes on so frequently. I used to think reading MRIs and Cat Scans was an exact science; it's like Impressionist paintings! You'd think that with more high-performance scans, the better they are, but they're generating so many images that it overwhelms the radiologist —"
LA Times
Monday, March 26, 2007"Groopman's writing style grabs the reader's attention by making his characters come alive on the page — so much so, in fact, that the reader truly cares about the medical dilemmas they are facing. He gives us more information about the patients than most books of this genre, so that we can follow the doctors' thinking and understand how their decisions are made. It is difficult to forget people like Anne Dodge because Groopman writes about their lives and frustrations. I was fascinated, disturbed and captivated by the real-life dramas his doctors face in their triumphs and mistakes."
"'How Doctors Think' is a solid, well-considered prescription for doctors and their patients to read."
The full article is here.
