Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Written by Lisa Sanders
Narrated by Lisa Sanders
4/5
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About this audiobook
"The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is, 'What is wrong with me?' They want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name, to know it-on some level-restores a measure of control, independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently all a good doctor has to offer."
A healthy young man suddenly loses his memory-making him unable to remember the events of each passing hour. Two patients diagnosed with Lyme disease improve after antibiotic treatment-only to have their symptoms mysteriously return. A young woman lies dying in the ICU-bleeding, jaundiced, incoherent-and none of her doctors know what is killing her. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving these and other diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis.
Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose illness and disease. And yet mistakes are made, diagnoses missed, symptoms or tests misunderstood. In this high-tech world of modern medicine, Sanders shows us that knowledge, while essential, is not sufficient to unravel the complexities of illness. She presents an unflinching look inside the detective story that marks nearly every illness-the diagnosis-revealing the combination of uncertainty and intrigue that doctors face when confronting patients who are sick or dying. Through dramatic stories of patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of getting the patient's story, the challenges of the physical exam, the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Sanders chronicles the real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical mysteries that not only illustrate the art and science of diagnosis, but often save the patients' lives.
Lisa Sanders
Lisa Sanders followed her new husband to Alaska for his first job out of college. Twenty-six years later, with a successful business and her last child about to leave for college, she discovered in Uganda that the gifts of mercy, love and compassion given to women are meant to be shared with children not only in our own homes, but across the street and around the world. Lisa lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband Greg, two dogs and her two sons when they are not away at University. She serves on the board of directors for Hope4Kids International.
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Reviews for Every Patient Tells a Story
121 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5House is one of my favorite shows on tv today so you can imagine how tickled I was to pick up Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis at the library. Lisa Sanders is a consultant for the show and apparently an inspiration ? as well. Sanders was a former tv reporter covering medical news who then went back to school to get her medical degree and she became interested in diagnostics, which is very much like playing detective:
“…what captured my imagination were the stories doctors told about their remarkable diagnoses – mysterious symptoms that were puzzled out and solved”.
In this book, Sanders shares the stories she has come across, whther personally or secondhand. Some of them are rather intriguing, and would definitely fit into an episode of House. She advocates the return of the physical exam, which was once the centre of a diagnosis, but has now been replaced with lab work or diagnostic imaging. She argues that medical students and practicing physicians have lost some skills as a result: learning to listen, learning to feel, learning how to see.
Sanders isn’t the most evocative of writers. While the cases are fascinating, a few days after reading this book, I couldn’t quite remember them anymore. Perhaps I had other things on my mind. Finishing my work for instance, the little one moving around inside of me (one month to go!). I obviously wouldn’t make it as a doctor – in one ear out the other is not a skill one would appreciate in a doctor. At any rate, this was an enjoyable read, which is perhaps odd to say, as this is a book full of sick and dying people. It’s obviously not a comforting read either, as this book makes it all too clear that doctors are human, that they make mistakes, plenty of mistakes, mistakes that could’ve been caught early on.
A good read if you’re interested in how a doctor thinks, and how diagnosis works. Or if you’re just a fan of House! - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm a huge fan of the TV-series House for which Dr. Sanders is technical advisor, so I was very excited to read her take on the "art of diagnosis." The cases described in this book are like reading an episode of Medical Mysteries and are scary, but also (obviously) absolutely fascinating. Sanders' main thesis in the book is that doctors need to listen to their patients more and learn how to conduct proper physical examinations rather than simply rely on tests. Basically, she seems to say that doctors need to be better doctors, which is a weird statement unless you are a person who believes that doctors are infallible, which is a highly inadvisable belief to hold. Actually, she is making a statement about how doctors are educated in the US, but I'm not sure this book is an efficient way of affecting that process.Then, the book takes a strange turn when it starts to talk about Lyme disease - what begins as a standard description of a patient case unravels into what can only be described as a rant against doctors who champion the idea (seemingly mistakenly) about a condition called "chronic Lyme disease." I understand that Dr. Sanders feels strongly about the issue and I appreciate her passion, but it's rather misplaced in this particular book. The last section of the book talks about something I find very interesting - the internet's role in future diagnosis! This part discusses the beginnings of medical databases and how the internet has made most of them obsolete - enlightening and really rather funny for anyone who has ever Googled a symptom!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting cases presented, but author also discusses US doctor training instead of staying with the medical puzzles. Would have been better to write two separate books.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great stuff. Sanders begins with an emphasis on pattern recognition as a means to diagnosis. As she goes along she shifts to greater emphasis on differential diagnosis lists and decision trees. The importance of the physical exam is stressed made impressively clear throughout.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dr. Lisa Sanders discusses the art and science of medical diagnosis, with lots of examples of puzzling medical problems and lots of analysis of how doctors figure out what's happening in a human body and why they sometimes get it wrong. Sanders is a technical advisor for the TV series House, and many of the medical stories she tells here would be right at home on an episode of the show, but in many ways Dr. Sanders is the exact opposite of Dr. House. She puts a lot of stress on the importance of clear communication between doctors and patients and on not losing sight of the patient's humanity. Most particularly, she emphasizes the importance of hands-on physical examinations, which she claims is something of a dying art thanks to the modern tendency to rely -- or over-rely -- on high-tech medical tests and to the fact that it's not taught effectively in medical schools.The case studies she presents here are often fascinating in themselves, as medical detective stories, but what makes this book really worth reading is its eye-opening look at the difficulties of diagnosis, the all too many ways in which doctors can fail, and the potential ways in which doctors, patients and teachers can work to improve things. It is, however, also mildly terrifying, especially for someone with occasional hypochondriac tendencies, to be so vividly reminded of all the strange, hard-to-figure-out things that can go badly wrong in the human body. And it may be very useful and important to be reminded that doctors are fallible human beings like the rest of us, but damn it, I still desperately want them to magically know what's wrong with me when I ask.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a great insight into how doctors think and how they diagnose -- or rather, how they are supposed to do those two things. It's compelling yet terrifying reading -- compelling because of the author's subject matter and her incredibly accessible writing style; terrifying because one of her main points is that doctors are no longer being trained in the art of the physical diagnosis, and that can lead to horrendous misdiagnoses that can happen to any patient anywhere. Nevertheless, this book is absolutely required reading.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent book. Every physician, medical student, patient, should read this. Fascinating look into a world few of us understand. I always thought that diagnosis was just the matter of drawing some blood and testing it, turns out, it is not that easy....
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like some odd genres: Books about Books...Books about People Who Move and Start Over...Books about Cooking...and the genre this book falls into, Books about Doctors.Don't ask me why.Books like this one fascinate me. I'm struck by the way doctors work on people's bodies using a clever combination of science and intuition. This is a particularly intriguing book to me as it deals with the art of diagnosis, using scientific knowledge along with experience and hunches, to figure out why things aren't right with a person. The author started out in television and ended up becoming a medical doctor. She seems to have just the right combination of knowledge about medicine and ability to write well to create this book. Very good book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Diagnosis: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Medical Mysteries is a collection of case studies and thoughtful insights into the technique of diagnosis. Lisa Sanders is a medical doctor, staff member at Yale University School of Medicine and technical advisor to the hit T.V. show, House. She is the author of the popular monthly Diagnosis column in New York Times Magazine.Diagnosis focuses on the challenges faced by doctors when attempting to diagnose the cause of a patient's illness. Sanders explores tools such as the traditional physical exam, the knowledge accumulated by individual doctors and the ever-increasing use of diagnostics such as CAT, MRI and echocardigraphs.Interpersed between all these aspects are a collection of short tales - each recounting a particular medical mystery. Each case study clearly illustrates and highlights the relevant topic under discussion. From West Nile disease to the uncommon CannabinoidHyperemesis, Sanders takes the reader through a wide range of medical puzzles and the challenges facing today's doctors.In an world with an ever-increasing amount of medical knowledge, a large dependence on technology, and decreasing use of the traditional exam, how will tomorrow's doctors fare? It makes the reader aware of the fact that doctors are human too, not all-knowing oracles of truth. Diagnosis is written in clear English, and is more than suitable for a non-medical person to pcik up and read. A very interesting and honest book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If every patient tells a story, surely some of those stories are not dull? I only ask because after reading Lisa Sanders, MD exploration of all things diagnostic, I’m still not sure. This book is incredibly informative but it tends to be dry. Lisa Sanders is the technical advisor to TV’s House. In fact, she takes credit for partly inspiring the series. But her book reminds me that I’d rather watch House then read accounts of its medical basis. Every Patient has its interesting moments, but t isn’t exactly a book that you can relax with. I could only take so many of these medical mysteries a sitting before they tend to blur and run into one another. This inside look at how a doctor thinks, and how they manipulate the smallest symptoms or other clues to diagnose everything from West Nile to Cannabinoid Hyperemesis (yes, as in cannabis) is illuminating. And the anecdotes are good representatives to make Sanders’ aside point, that medical shortcuts are affecting the ability of doctors to make a correct diagnosis resulting in sub par care. Whether the fault is the skip of the routine physical exam or the brevity allotted for patient history and back story of an ailment, Sanders takes shots at the prevalent standards of practice. These points make for a scary but essential read. Skip this one at your own risk.