How Doctors Think.

Groopman, Jerome (author).

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By far the largest number of examples New Yorker staff writer and Harvard physician Groopman adduces to show how doctors think shows them thinking well for the good of their patients. In the initial example, one doctor seen by a woman with a long-standing weight-loss condition concedes being stumped and sends her to a specialist who finds the cause of her woes and, most probably, saves her from an early death. Both physicians are praiseworthy, the second more than the first only because he believed a patient whom others had come to pooh-pooh as a complainer and then thought of examining for something that the others had missed. The lesson? A doctor has to think with the patient, not despite or against her or from an assumption of superior knowledge. Subsequent chapters show doctors thinking in resistance to economic pressure by hospitals and insurers, in thorough solidarity with parents about their children’s care, against a host of professional assumptions and in resistance to pestering by drug companies—all to help patients achieve their own goals as far as possible. An epilogue suggests a few questions patients should ask to help their doctors think clearly and, as the last chapter’s title puts it, “In Service of the Soul.” A book to restore faith in an often-resented profession, well enough written to warrant its quarter-million-copy first printing.