Excellent! Well written; interesting case studies; useful suggestions and advice. I have benefitted from the suggestions myself, as have a couple of friends. ( )

Interesting insight into the way doctors think about patients, diseases, and diagnoses. Lots of case studies and interviews with doctors. ( )

Very good, if you've ever had difficulty communicating with your doctor, read this book ( )

As an artist, I particularly liked the chapter 'The Eye of the Beholder'. The are many good lessons here about the promises of technology amid the failures of human perception and human-machine interaction. "How you use the machine translates into what you get to see." ( )

A fascinating look at how doctors make diagnoses, focusing on the cognitive errors that lead doctors to sometimes misdiagnose problems, with potentially fatal results. I would recommend this book to doctors, patients with hard-to-diagnose problems, and people interested in errors in cognition. (I'm in the last group.) ( )

An excellent review of how doctors come to make diagnoses, and what errors are most likely with the different methods. It is written for the layman, with relatively little jargon, and that jargon is carefully explained whenever it appears. An engineer can think about a problem logically, then test the results to destruction. A doctor needs to be aware that there are variables that cannot be controlled for, and he or she knows there are some experiments that cannot be made. So how a skilled diagnostician uses the limited data available - how he asks the questions, how he interprets the answers and the test results, what's "going around", how he handles uncertainty, and how he himself was trained, all inform the diagnosis he arrives at. This book is useful for doctors, to help understand how diagnoses are made, and how they can be made better. It is also useful for patients - if a treatment is not working, how can you help your doctor look at it another way. It also shows that while there is much science in medicine, there is also much that is not known. This book also explains quite clearly the Baysian Analysis approach to medicine (also called "evidence based"): where it shines and why it sometimes leads away from the truth for a particular patient. There is some discussion of how our insurance system affects our care -- where "quality measures" may indicate that the process is working well, but an individual patient may benefit from a different process. This is a clearly written, easily read book, and provides valuable insights for patients (which is, nearly all of us) as well as physicians. ( )

Important subject matter, even for people who may think they'll never have a need for it. Hopefully, they won't. A bit 'scary', but definitely enlightening. Attempts to put some of the power back into the patient's hands. Descriptions of pharm reps and their tactics are, unfortunately, very accurate. ( )

A very fluffy thesis strings together some good advice for dealing with doctors and some insights into the profession. ( )

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman tells how misdiagnoses are commonly made. From failing to listen to the patient to assuming the problem is the same one the doctor has recently encountered, Groopman illustrates that doctors are, after all, only human. Few are lazy or uncaring, but most are frequently rushed, and all are under-compensated for the time they spend taking patient histories, because insurance companies pay much less for office visits than for test and procedures. No matter how successful the practice, if the doctor interrupts you frequently, if you think the doctor does not like you or does not understand you, it’s time to get that second opinion. ( )

Describes how a doctor may arrive at a diagnosis and a remedy via various processes. The effect of money is rather scary. There appears to be some luck in finding a doctor who can figure out what is going on. Included is an interesting discussion about arriving at a suitable treatment in some cancers cases.

Explores how doctors think and what judgements and mistakes they make based on their thought processes. Does this in 280 pages with lots of anecdotes and examples. An invaluable guide for communicating with your doctors in the future. Just what I look for in a non-fiction book: short, concise, anecdotal and friendly. ( )

This is a great book, but a little too long in places. Groopman goes through common cognitive errors and shows how doctors make them. He tells a story for each one. There is quite a lot of this. He also takes a few potshots at evidence based medicine along the way.

Sometimes I found myself wondering who the intended audience was. There was alot of advice for doctors about how to be better doctors, but there only seemed to be a smear of information about how to be a better patient and get better results from doctors. Overall, it was a good read and good information to know. ( )

This was a nice counterpoint to October's medical read, Better. Both take on the subject of how doctors interact with patients, and how they can learn to give better care. While I think Gawande is a stronger writer, this book is well-written and insightful. If you care about the subject, read both. ( )

Good book- not so much about how doctors actually think, but how they come to (or miss) a diagnosis. Problem solving techniques make this an interesting read, whether you're in the health profession or not. ( )

This book is written to try to explain how doctor's think for anyone who's ever been a patient. Groopman has thoroughly researched this topic, both by interviewing doctors and gathering as much relevant information on medical decision-making as he could. In short, he explains why doctor's make mistakes in diagnosis. It all comes down to being human.

In each chapter, Groopman describes an interesting case study in order to show a cognitive 'flaw' in diagnosis. I'll just list a few:

Doctors are taught to use Occam's razor, to find one answer whenever possible instead of two. But of course, sometimes a person really does have two conditions, lactose intolerance and irritable bowel syndrome, for instance, or Lyme disease complicating an old injury.

Doctors are taught to use statistics. If symptoms x, y, and z mean A 90% of the time, then they are taught to suspect A. In reality of course, 10% of their patients will have B, but it's hard to break out of the odds and insurance companies of course insist upon probabilistic methods.

Human beings are influenced by recent experience. If a doctor made a mistake in diagnosis once, he is much more likely to look for that combination of symptoms again, possibly over-compensating.

The power of positivity: if a test show something wrong (a mass on the MRI/ bad blood chemistry), a doctor may attribute the current symptoms to that condition, even though they could be unrelated.

No single doctor can know all existing medical knowledge. Thus, specialists view problems in terms of their specialty and generalists have less depth in any one field. Especially for obscure conditions, this can make diagnosis difficult.

Groopman goes on at great length, but the list is actually quite an interesting attempt to explain how people, not just doctors, deduce things. Many of the flaws Groopman points out are unavoidable. If there is a flaw in the book itself, it is that he is too little an apologist. That is, he seems to think doctors can learn to avoid these mistakes (true to some extent) and that if you just keep looking long enough you'll find a doctor who can give you the right diagnosis to your problem. Doesn't anyone remember anymore that we don't actually have an explanation for everything? If we did, we could pack up and go home. They could just reissue the same edition of all medical texts year after year. No, we are still learning, so even the best doctor, even the best collection of doctors, may not have an answer.

What Groopman does well is give the patient power to be part of the decision, to ask his doctor to think outside the box, to know no one is infallible, to participate. All in all, this was an interesting book, well-researched and with some very good observations. ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/174466.... ( )

This book is well-written and takes a good look at how doctors can unintentionally be harming their patients through cognitive errors. This is a very broad book, covering mostly adult internal medicine and radiology, with a little bit on the ICU and PICU. I'd like to see further books detailing cognitive errors of GPs, pediatricians, and OBs. However, if you are getting older or if you or someone you are close to is seriously ill, this is an excellent book to read to make sure that your doctor and you are on the same page when it comes to your care. I'd also liked to have seen more resources for patients. ( )

Poses though-provoking questions on decision making and paradigms in the medical profession. ( )

Jerome Groopman explores different medical cases and analyzes the diagnostic process of doctors in different fields. He provides advice for patients on how to talk to doctors and what questions to ask to help the doctor's thought process. This was a very interesting and readable book, especially for anyone interested in medicine. ( )

This book will change how you look at the field of medicine. Groopman does a great job of describing common medical thinking errors and showing more of the human side of doctors' decision making. Physicians are fallible, sometimes far more often than you would expect, and they need input and pushing from their patients to ensure that they provide the best care. I don't own this book, but I think I will now have to buy it to refer back to if I ever become seriously ill. ( )