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.
New York Times
Friday, March 23, 2007"In his final chapter Dr. Groopman discusses two terminally ill cancer patients for whom radically different courses of treatment were recommended, based less on the medical facts than on the patients’ philosophy of life. Here his general impatience with numbers, technology and rigid conceptual schemes in medical decision-making comes to the fore, as he describes the efforts of two doctors to read the characters of their patients and to help them make decisions that they can live with, and ultimately die with. This is medicine at its best, 'a mix of science and soul.'"
Visit the New York Times website for the full article.
CBS: Q and A
Wednesday, March 21, 2007"Last week, the Evening News talked with Dr. Jerome Groopman about his new book, "How Doctors Think." Hundreds of viewers wrote in with insightful questions, and Dr. Groopman has responded to some below."
Read the question and answer session here.
The Charlie Rose Show
Tuesday, March 20, 2007Dr. Groopman appeared on the Charlie Rose Show this week to talk about his new book and to share more of his insights into the medical mind. Click Here to watch his appearance. He comes on at about the 38:30 mark so you can fast forward to his segment if you wish.
Star Tribune
Tuesday, March 20, 2007"More than ever, doctors need their patients to guide them, to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, Groopman says. Understanding how doctors think and why they do what they do is the best way for patients to elicit good medical care."
Read the full article here.
Colbert Report Interview
Monday, March 19, 2007Click here to watch last night's interview about How Doctors Think on the Colbert Report.
Washington Post
Tuesday, March 20, 2007"Groopman not only wants doctors to do better, he also wants to understand what goes wrong when they make mistakes. Interweaving moving clinical anecdotes with the latest science, he argues that physicians have insufficiently scrutinized how they arrive at decisions. 'Experts studying misguided care,' he writes, 'have recently concluded that the majority of errors are due to flaws in physician thinking, not technical mistakes.'"
The full article is available on the Washington Post website. Registration may be required, but it's free.
New York Observer
Monday, March 19, 2007The New York Observer also had some interesting comments on the book. Here’s an excerpt and their website has more.
"'When and why does thinking go right or go wrong in medicine?' he asks. The answer is important, according to Dr. Groopman, because the majority of medical mistakes come from 'flaws in physician thinking'—not technical errors, as many people assume. And while new med-school teaching trends are meant to improve the problem, to train students to streamline how they diagnose disease (think complex algorithms and decision trees), Dr. Groopman worries that they could have the opposite effect: The next generation of doctors may 'function like a well-programmed computer' that can’t process ambiguity and uncertainty."
BusinessWeek
Sunday, March 18, 2007There has also been some great coverage about the book at BusinessWeek. This review went in depth with some of the case studies in the book and found the patient advice found in the book to be very helpful.
"Health-care horror stories such as Dodge's are the backbone of How Doctors Think, by Dr. Jerome Groopman, a practicing physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Drawing partly on his own experience, Groopman delves deeply into the cognitive processes and prejudices that can drive physicians toward faulty diagnoses. Add in industry pressures, he argues, such as profit-hungry HMOs and aggressive pharmaceutical marketing practices, and you end up with a recipe for bad medical care. In a tone that grips but is never overwrought, Groopman provides a rare window into the doctor's exam room and passes along lessons valuable to all patients."
Boston Globe Article
Sunday, March 18, 2007"All of us as physicians are fallible, and while it is unrealistic to imagine a perfect clinical world, it is imperative to reduce the frequency of misdiagnosis. I believe all health professionals should learn in-depth about why and how and when we make errors in thinking, and I also believe that if our patients and their families and friends know about the common cognitive pitfalls, they can ask specific questions to help us think better." –Jerome Groopman
Read the whole article on the Boston Globe website.
Wall Street Journal
Friday, March 16, 2007The Wall Street Journal had some great thought provoking questions of their own to tie into the book.
"What kind of doctor do you want? A no-nonsense decision maker who tells you within minutes what's wrong and what you need to do to fix it? Or a caring communicator who listens at length, expresses his own doubts and outlines a variety of treatment options?"
People Magazine
Friday, March 16, 2007People Magazine writes, "Understanding what goes on in that fallible white-coat’s head, says How Doctors Think author Jerome Groopman, M.D., can help you receive the best care."
CBS Coverage
Friday, March 16, 2007CBS has been giving How Doctors Think a lot of attention with both evening news and morning news segments.
So his prescription for patients? He says, turn the tables and question your doctor. "A patient can say, 'What else could it be?' especially if it's not getting better. Or, 'Could two things be going on at the same time?'," Groopman recommends. He adds that you should never be afraid to tell your doctor what's worrying you the most. "Then the doctor becomes more sensitive to what the person is feeling about his or her body," Groopman says.
Read more with an article on the CBS website or watch the segment for yourself.
TIME Magazine
Thursday, March 15, 2007TIME Magazine has a review of How Doctors Think. Have a look.
"The result of Groopman's journey is How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin; 307 pages), an engagingly written book that is must reading for every physician who cares for patients and every patient who wishes to get the best care. Groopman says patients can prompt broader, sharper and less prejudiced thinking by asking doctors open-ended questions and learning to identify some of their common thinking mistakes."
NPR Interview
Wednesday, March 14, 2007"We as physicians tend to latch on to the initial information that we get from a patient. We are often working under time pressure and we tend to make snap judgments and use shortcuts in thinking so the first information we get, what we first hear, very strongly guides where our mind works and what conclusions we come to." (Dr. Groopman)
Listen to the Full Interview!
Click Here
