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Dr. Lisa Sanders is the doctor who inspired the TV show House. She is apparently a genius diagnostician and if her waiting list was not three years long, I would have already seen her. Her book is marketed as tales of medical mysteries and their diagnoses, complete with the doctor’s process of diagnosing, which is why I bought it.
Approximately 20% of the book consists of that. The other 80% is her opinion that the physical examination of the patient (as opposed to mechanical scans) has a long history, is very important, is underused and poorly taught, and needs to be taught better and done more. She’s probably right but it was incredibly repetitive. She could have summed up her thoughts on that in one or two chapters, leaving the rest of the book for the stories which is undoubtedly why everyone bought it. Annoyingly not what it says on the tin.
Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Any recs for books that are actually about diagnosis? (Medical, not psychological; I'm good on the psych front.)
Also, any recs for a book on antibiotics that is 1) about their current use, not their history (I'm familiar with their history), 2) comprehensible to a layperson?
I am particularly interested in learning more about how, after spending my entire life being told that antibiotics have very limited and specific uses and do not cure most things (due to doctors trying to cut down on inappropriate usage) I have recently discovered that, in fact, they have an extremely wide range of uses and "condition responds to antibiotics and, as far as we can tell, to nothing else" is nowhere near as diagnostically useful as I had assumed in narrowing down what that condition might be. For instance, d-cycloserine, an antibiotic normally used to treat tuberculosis, has cognitive effects which may make it useful in the treatment of PTSD.
Approximately 20% of the book consists of that. The other 80% is her opinion that the physical examination of the patient (as opposed to mechanical scans) has a long history, is very important, is underused and poorly taught, and needs to be taught better and done more. She’s probably right but it was incredibly repetitive. She could have summed up her thoughts on that in one or two chapters, leaving the rest of the book for the stories which is undoubtedly why everyone bought it. Annoyingly not what it says on the tin.
Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Any recs for books that are actually about diagnosis? (Medical, not psychological; I'm good on the psych front.)
Also, any recs for a book on antibiotics that is 1) about their current use, not their history (I'm familiar with their history), 2) comprehensible to a layperson?
I am particularly interested in learning more about how, after spending my entire life being told that antibiotics have very limited and specific uses and do not cure most things (due to doctors trying to cut down on inappropriate usage) I have recently discovered that, in fact, they have an extremely wide range of uses and "condition responds to antibiotics and, as far as we can tell, to nothing else" is nowhere near as diagnostically useful as I had assumed in narrowing down what that condition might be. For instance, d-cycloserine, an antibiotic normally used to treat tuberculosis, has cognitive effects which may make it useful in the treatment of PTSD.
, which reaches the heights of fine literature, but Sanders's book is informative and worth reading if you're interested in the subject.
is more of general interest, assuming that medical details don't make you turn green and then faint. He wrote it in 1938, looking back on his long career as an American doctor, and the first chapter looks even farther back, to medicine as it was practiced in his boyhood (the 1880s).
