An invaluable guide for doctors and patients on how to “recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts” of the doctor-patient...
Ofri (School of Medicine/New York Univ.; Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients, 2011, etc.) uses her experiences as a medical student and practicing physician at Bellevue Hospital to illuminate a side of medicine infrequently addressed: the psychological toll on dedicated doctors.
The author begins with the experiences of third-year medical students, as they leave the classroom for the “the ongoing bedlam” of a hospital ward. In addition to the difficult task of learning all the medical jargon, they absorb the gallows humor that helps medical professionals deal with the constant stress that goes with the territory. They must also learn how to deal with the stench of disease—which is worse in the case of the homeless—without losing sight of a patient's humanity. Ofri ably describes the sheer terror that can occur when an exhausted intern or resident faces a cardiac arrest or other emergency. She describes an incident in her own career in her first week as a medical consultant. After her beeper went off, she rushed to the bedside of the patient (with interns and residents crowding around waiting for her directions), and her mind temporarily blanked. She explains how the fear of making a wrong decision stalks even an experienced doctor, especially when overworked and tired. To function, they must be able to suppress their emotions without losing the empathetic doctor-patient connection that is an essential part of the healing process. However, the constant stress can lead to temporary or permanent doctor burnout. Ofri also deals with what happens when doctors make mistakes. The loss of self-confidence and shame they feel is scarring, even when they receive support from superiors.
An invaluable guide for doctors and patients on how to “recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts” of the doctor-patient relationship.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7332-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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