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Summary: Interesting, well researched, and well written
Review: A fantstic read for everyone- patients and doctors alike!
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Summary: Can We Handle The Truth?!?
Review: A fearless and eye-opening look at the terrible mistakes that occur in medical settings. Not just a collection of horrific anecdotes (though there are PLENTY of those.) There are REAL solutions set forth here and I hope someone is paying attention. To their credit, the authors reveal what lay people have never before been privy to--some of which falls into the "Yikes! Maybe ignorance really IS bliss" category, but makes for engrossing reading. I could not put it down until the last page. This should be required reading for policymakers and potential patients alike.
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Summary: Internal Bleeding : The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Ep
Review: At first glance, a book about medical errors might lead the reader to expect scare tactics or, particularly since it is written by physicians, a defense of the medical profession. Internal Bleeding is a pleasant surprise-it provides a brilliant, well-balanced, and easy-to-comprehend look at how medical mistakes occur and how they might be minimized. Many people think that medical errors are simply the result of bad caregivers. The authors, who also edit a government-sponsored e-journal on healthcare quality, use numerous case studies to show that medical errors are more commonly the result of a progression of systemic mistakes, slips, or miscues that lead to an adverse outcome. The bibliography, the supplementary tips on medications, and the list of questions to help the consumer determine if a hospital has a culture of safety add value. Marilyn Sue Bogner's Misadventures in Healthcare provides similar content but assumes some prior knowledge of systems thinking and error analysis. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries
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Summary: TYPICAL WACHTER
Review: Dr. Wachter is well known within the medical community and at UCSF for being a slimy opportunist, anxious to put his smirking face on the promo posters for the trend of the month. How surprising is it, then, that with the overhyped concept of "medical errors" in the fore of everyone's mind, that we find none other than Dr. Wachter publishing a book on the subject under the auspices of "academia." The title itself speaks to Wachter's motive: is this legitimate research or a sensationalist piece of yellow journalism? Which is not to de-legitimize the episodes contained within, or the idea of systemic medical errors in general. Rather to point out that in jumping from the "noble profession" of academics to the talk-show publicity circuit, Dr. Wachter loses in credibility what he gains in book sales.
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Summary: Required Reading
Review: Finally a fresh, insider view of the problems with western medicine. As an attorney who has represented both physicians and patients, it is refreshing to see a realistic account of the nature and extent of medical mistakes. Hopefully readers of this well-written book will become jurors who come to the courtroom with no bias, realizing that medical mistakes are made and that physicians/health care providers are human and like all of us, make mistakes. The only issue I have with the authors is their characterization of "slips" as being outside the definition of negligence. A slip, is a mistake, is (more often than not) negligence. It doesn't mean the actor is a bad person, or intended a bad result, only that a mistake was made and, if injured as a result of that mistake, the patient should be compensated.
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Summary: An honest analysis by credentialed insiders
Review: Finally a fresh, insider view of the problems with western medicine. As an attorney who has represented both physicians and patients, it is refreshing to see a realistic account of the nature and extent of medical mistakes. Hopefully readers of this well-written book will become jurors who come to the courtroom with no bias, realizing that medical mistakes are made and that physicians/health care providers are human and like all of us, make mistakes. The only issue I have with the authors is their characterization of "slips" as being outside the definition of negligence. A slip, is a mistake, is (more often than not) negligence. It doesn't mean the actor is a bad person, or intended a bad result, only that a mistake was made and, if injured as a result of that mistake, the patient should be compensated.
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Summary: A Book For Everyone! (from a stay-at-home mom)
Review: I highly recommend this book!
I first saw Dr. Wachter on IMUS. The interview was terrific. Not only was the subject matter interesting, the doctor spoke in a language anyone could understand, and he was funny to boot. He made a great analogy about calling his favorite Chinese take-out restaurant to place an order. Before they hung up, they repeated the order back to him (like the world would end if he got the wrong kind of soup), but nurses and pharmacists have not been trained to do the same when a prescription is phoned in. The just say thanks to the doctor and hang up.
Well, I immediately bought the book and could not put it down. So many of these types of books speak to other medical personnel, this one is for everyone. I have recommended it to my book club (15 suburban Moms) and the discussions have been quite interesting. We all have our own stories to share about the medical process. Who doesn't have a story about a doctors appointment with an ailing parent or a 2:00am emergency room visit with their toddler? I now feel better equipped to deal with these situations.
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Summary: Riveting AND educational!
Review: I strongly suspect that the publishers insisted on the title of this book over the objections of the authors, because (as another reviewer has noted) the title is clearly sensationalistic and very much out of line with the even-handed and level-headed treatment of the rest of the book. Indeed, the title is perhaps the ONLY thing I would criticize about this otherwise excellent and gripping description of the underlying causes of medical mistakes and what can be done about them. I cannot praise the quality of the writing enough. The authors accomplish just the right blend of fascinating case studies and theoretical analysis. They make their basic point (that any system run by humans is fallible and medical mistakes are inevitable) very effectively in the beginning pages of the book by describing two case studies where mistakes were made...with the punch line being that the mistakes were committed by the authors themselves. Beginning the book this way was in part so effective because it gets across the message that the vast majority of mistakes that are made are not the result of negligent, careless, or malicious physicians; rather, they are the inevitable consequence of a system that struggles to cope with the complexity of the ever-changing demands of a never-ending stream of patients. The second most admirable feature of this book, in my opinion, is that it does not merely criticize but also offers suggestions for improving the delivery of medical services to eliminate errors, from such simple steps as physicians "signing their sites" (to prevent, say, amputation of the wrong limb) to computerizing medication orders (to prevent errors due to physicans' notoriously poor handwriting) to more systemic changes in malpractice law. I thought the authors' suggestions on this latter topic to be highly intriguing and novel. The idea of adopting a modified no-fault system for compensating patients injured by medical errors is, in my mind, a terrific idea, and I would love to see the authors' recommendations in this regard enter the national debate on malpractice litigation reform. Perhaps the only part of the book I found even slightly disappointing was the authors' reluctance to deal more bluntly with the problem of incompetent or alcoholic/drug dependent doctors. The authors acknowledge that these "bad apples" exist, but they do little beyond saying that hospitals and physicians tend to cover up for the incompetents in their ranks. My mother-in-law died from botched surgery; after she died, the hospital risk manager told us to our faces that this particular surgeon had had "other surgeries that did not turn out as he had planned." I think if I had read this book before my mother-in-law died, I would have been more proactive in pressing our complaints about this surgeon, who--a scary thought--is still operating on people but probably should not be. But these kinds of physicians are in the minority, and the contribution this book makes is to describe the much more common ways in which patients end up being hurt by medical care designed to help them. I read a lot of nonfiction, and this book is one of the rare examples of nonfiction that can keep you glued to your chair and turning the pages eagerly. I think it ranks right up there with Jon Krakauer's "Into thin air" and Richard Preston's "The hot zone" in terms of readability and interest value. Yet it also probably outranks those and other books in terms of potential social value. It could well be one of the few books with potential to inform and enable real changes in social policy that has been published lately.
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Summary: Required Reading
Review: I'm a nurse administrator and educator at the medical center that is home to the authors of this book. I would make this required reading for any of my students, since they will be working in similar systems and can greatly benefit from the wisdom offered by Drs. Wachter and Shojania. I would also make this required reading for patients, families, and friends (and have already given many copies to my own friends and family!), since they are in the best position to be thoughtful about their own care and they way in which they proceed through any of the healthcare systems. If both providers and patients are informed and engaged in communication, the outcomes will surely be more positive.
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Summary: Remarkable book
Review: More than just dramatic tales of all the things that can go wrong in medicine, an unblinking, and really quite gutsy, insider's look at what American healthcare has become. The book grabbed me right from the first page, and it remained compelling, easy to read, and remarkably insightful till the very end. Not only will it make me a better consumer of medical care (I'll know what questions to ask and what to watch out for), but I have gained a measure of sympathy for my friends who are doctors and nurses. We really have to tackle this problem in a whole new way. I hope this book is the starting point for doing just that. Bravo!
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