Your Medical Choices
Jerome Groopman & Pamela Hartzband
‘This important and riveting book could change and perhaps even save your life.’
Daniel Gilbert, author of STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS‘This book should be required reading for doctors and patients alike.’
Dan Ariely, author of PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL and THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY‘Groopman and Hartzband provide a brilliant guide to navigating some of the most important decisions of our lives.’
Jonathan Alter, author of THE PROMISEThe essential tools for making the best medical decisions, cutting through the confusion caused by the health-care system, the media, and gaps in our own reasoning
Making the right medical choices is harder than ever. Whether we’re deciding to take a cholesterol drug or choosing a cancer treatment, we are overwhelmed by information from all sides: doctors’ recommendations, dissenting expert opinions, confusing statistics, the advice of friends, and claims on the internet.
Your Medical Choices shows us how to chart a clear path through this sea of confusion. Drawing on scores of patient case studies, as well as insights from psychologists, economists, and other experts, Drs Groopman and Hartzband help us to better assess the impact of our decisions. They reveal how our personal beliefs profoundly influence our choices, and expose the external factors — such as misleading narratives or statistics — that can lead our thinking astray.
When conflicting information pulls us back and forth between options, when we feel pressured by doctors or loved ones to make a particular choice, or when we have no previous experience to guide us through a crisis, Your Medical Choices will prove an essential companion.
‘Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband remind us that medicine is a profoundly human - and hence inevitably complex - enterprise. By elucidating the often subtle and varied ways that patients make decisions, they will help to sharpen the thinking of any reader facing a medical situation, however grave or pedestrian. This utterly fascinating book, packed with gripping case studies, presents a timely and finely nuanced analysis of a hitherto overlooked subject.’
Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of WASHINGTON‘Bringing the deep sensitivity and outstanding clinical skill that characterize all of his writings, Jerome Groopman has joined forces with Pamela Hartzband to bring us a message of wisdom and far-ranging importance. The complexities that face any patient in making personal medical decisions are here described, analyzed and clarified by two master physicians, who guide us with empathy, sincere caring and wide experience.’
Sherwin B. Nuland, author of HOW WE DIE'This is a useful book, designed to help navigate modern medicine's sea of confusing choices.'
Lucy Sussex (Sun Herald)Jerome Groopman
Jerome Groopman, MD, 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.
Pamela Hartzband
Jerome Groopman, MD, and Pamela Hartzband, MD, are on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and on the staff of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both in Boston. They have collaborated on articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other publications. Groopman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller How Doctors Think.
Buy from Readings
Extent: 320pp
Size: 210mm x 135mm
ISBN (13): 9781921844577
RRP: $29.95
Pub date: January 2012
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