Summary and Reviews of How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

How Doctors Think

by Jerome Groopman
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  • First Published:
  • Mar 19, 2007, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2008, 336 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

The renowned Harvard Medical School physician and New Yorker writer Jerome Groopman presents an entirely new way of understanding medicine and medical care to give patients and their families insight into why some doctors succeed in thinking through problems and why some doctors fail.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong -- with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can -- with our help -- avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track.

Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems.

How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

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Reviews

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In a similar vein to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Groopman suggests that if doctors can become more aware of the thinking process that they go through to reach a diagnosis, and in particular to the role that their first impression plays in that process, they can become better diagnosticians. He suggests that patients recognize that "misguided care results from a cascade of cognitive errors", and thus they can help the diagnostic process by presenting their symptoms in such a way that the correct diagnosis can be made...continued

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Beyond the Book



Jerome Groopman, M.D., holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published more than 150 scientific articles. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written editorials on policy issues for the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Full bio.

Interesting Link:
Dr Groopman has written many articles for The New Yorker, some of which are reprinted ...

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