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There's a Cure for This: A Memoir
The striking debut memoir from award-winning doctor and writer, Emma Espiner.
202 pages, Paperback
Published July 28, 2023
51 people are currently reading
910 people want to read
About the author
Emma Espiner
2 books7 followersEmma Espiner (née Wehipeihana) is a New Zealand broadcaster and political commentator. In 2020, she won Opinion Writer of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.
She is a columnist for Newsroom and hosts a podcast Getting Better for Radio New Zealand about Māori health equity.
Abridged from Wikipedia
She is a columnist for Newsroom and hosts a podcast Getting Better for Radio New Zealand about Māori health equity.
Abridged from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
May 1, 2023
I adored this memoir.
From the pepeha at the beginning to the trembling mauri of an ending that felt like a new beginning. We don’t often hear from our indigenous surgeons, a taonga perspective hidden by the few Māori who become surgeons and within the confines of a busy health care system. I felt so seen as a Māori nurse, walking into the hospital with my tā moko and heard as you wrote about patients whom may act different when you’re in the room but at the end of the day, you’re still apart of the system they do not trust. You did a great job acknowledging that, and having empathy for it. I want to read more.
I just about cried reading this knowing Nico has such an amazing mā, whakapapa and taonga for her own tamariki one day.
Beautiful, empowering, vulnerable, humble and sadness with ancestral wisdom all interwoven like tight flax. I enjoyed reading this book. Ka mau te wehi e kare, ngā mihi.
From the pepeha at the beginning to the trembling mauri of an ending that felt like a new beginning. We don’t often hear from our indigenous surgeons, a taonga perspective hidden by the few Māori who become surgeons and within the confines of a busy health care system. I felt so seen as a Māori nurse, walking into the hospital with my tā moko and heard as you wrote about patients whom may act different when you’re in the room but at the end of the day, you’re still apart of the system they do not trust. You did a great job acknowledging that, and having empathy for it. I want to read more.
I just about cried reading this knowing Nico has such an amazing mā, whakapapa and taonga for her own tamariki one day.
Beautiful, empowering, vulnerable, humble and sadness with ancestral wisdom all interwoven like tight flax. I enjoyed reading this book. Ka mau te wehi e kare, ngā mihi.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 9, 2023
amazing!!! the weaving of personal & medical & institutional & political narratives is so engaging and refreshingly direct. It was cool to see threads of similarities across disciplines, in relation to a tikanga law paper I’m doing at the moment.
February 15, 2024
So very good, please read.
June 9, 2023
Emma, Emma, bless your beautiful and strong and tenacious heart. Your wisdom, your unique way of looking at and moving within this troubled world of ours. You shine, not only the choices you have made in your life, but in how you write about them. Your words and the putting together of them are like music, and your soul sings as I read. What talented women we have in this country, and you lady, are simply outstanding. I almost cried when I got to your last chapter, as more challenges are heaped on you. Don't burn out, please, this country needs people like you - dedicated, smart, determined and able to see a way through the mess.
June 23, 2023
incredible!!! I love a medical memoir and a medical show but Middlemore where I’ve spent long grim hours, kaupapa Māori and actual New Zealanders make this book a ZINGER. It is very readable and compelling but quite obfuscating in a way that reminds you that there are real people at the heart of this story, whose own stories must be treated with compassion and care. Conveys so much in sparse prose - fantastically written.
September 8, 2024
An absolute privilege to read this very personal and raw memoir from one of my classmates at med school. Emma puts into words what I have tried to articulate for years, about what being a junior doctor is really like; about what a living hell the hospital environment can be, but also the honour of meeting and caring for people from all walks of life and learning their valuable stories. While being completely realistic about the state of healthcare in New Zealand, and the vast amounts of racism still ever present in the profession, Emma manages to portray a deep care for what she does, something that can be easily lost in such a gruelling career. Ngā mihi maioha, Emma.
July 4, 2023
Required reading.
October 2, 2024
Funny and poignant, inspirational and sad, Emma Espiner's memoir reveals the state of our health care system through unique eyes. Her childhood spread between the lower North Island and Tākaka and her mixed heritage makes this a unique insight into our multicultural and evolving country. Espiner is an excellent writer and I learned a lot from her writing here.
August 12, 2023
Far out what a wonderful book.
Reading it during a stressful period at the hospital maybe wasn’t the best choice for relaxing down time but that’s 100% my fault, the book was thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless
Emma is very inspiring and is very real about the realities of healthcare in New Zealand and I loved reading about what she brings to medicine and her patients. I’d love to be her patient, the end.
Reading it during a stressful period at the hospital maybe wasn’t the best choice for relaxing down time but that’s 100% my fault, the book was thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless
Emma is very inspiring and is very real about the realities of healthcare in New Zealand and I loved reading about what she brings to medicine and her patients. I’d love to be her patient, the end.
December 31, 2023
Couldn't have asked for a better pukapuka to see te tau hou Pākehā OUTTIES!! I love how drawn in I was, further and further until I realised it was the acknowledgements and I sadly needed to come up for air now. This has inspired me to do all the things.
Espiner's style of writing is so moreish and aware and unburdened by political neutrality (iykyk) and I want her to narrate every piece of my work day to hold me accountable. Makes you literally think about your role in The System (for me that's a public servant who is Māori but am I a Māori public servant?)
10/10/10/10/10
Espiner's style of writing is so moreish and aware and unburdened by political neutrality (iykyk) and I want her to narrate every piece of my work day to hold me accountable. Makes you literally think about your role in The System (for me that's a public servant who is Māori but am I a Māori public servant?)
10/10/10/10/10
December 28, 2023
Crack up, relatable, tender and insightful. Heavy with out being heavy. I really enjoyed this series of essays that offers a balance of being both sceptical and optimistic.
lots of highlighting went on while reading this - note to self to revisit a couple of stand out chapters for me: ‘I’m going to demonstrate empathy now’, ‘Tangi on State Highway 1’ and ‘Storytelling is the Medicine’
lots of highlighting went on while reading this - note to self to revisit a couple of stand out chapters for me: ‘I’m going to demonstrate empathy now’, ‘Tangi on State Highway 1’ and ‘Storytelling is the Medicine’
December 18, 2023
Exceptional! It was always going to be, regardless of my well-developed girl-crush for Emma Espiner.
I’ll be the first to point out that it’s taken me ages to read this book, but for no other reason than I just didn’t want it to end so I kept going back and re-reading great chunks of it. Highly recommended reading.
I’ll be the first to point out that it’s taken me ages to read this book, but for no other reason than I just didn’t want it to end so I kept going back and re-reading great chunks of it. Highly recommended reading.
April 8, 2025
I loved that each chapter was complete in itself. I love the mana-enhancing way Emma wrote about the people she encountered.
I despair of what our medical profession must contend with.
Beautiful writing.
Grateful for the insight.
Glad none of my kids wanted to be a doctor (although my eldest is a Vet)
Deserving of its best first book award.
I despair of what our medical profession must contend with.
Beautiful writing.
Grateful for the insight.
Glad none of my kids wanted to be a doctor (although my eldest is a Vet)
Deserving of its best first book award.
November 25, 2023
Though-provoking insights and reflections by Dr Emma Espiner as she looks back on her early life, pathway to medicine and the future of the health system in Aotearoa. Some great advice for surviving life in PGY1.
June 24, 2024
As is evident by how quickly I devoured this book, I absolutely loved every bit of it. Witty, insightful, poignant, just funny enough to make me laugh between moments of introspection, I reckon it’s pretty much exactly the book I needed to read with my own med school graduation so imminent. Thank you for being so real. There are so many wonderful passages I’ve saved, passed on, plan to revisit, those nine tips for PGY1 very much included.
February 16, 2025
Picked this back up on the mountain after going off medical books for a while!! Bloody epic mahi from Emma, made an even better read after getting the chance to work with her at middlemore. Very inspiring wahine and a huge role model in the medical field !!
May 27, 2023
Beautifully written and reflective of our shared humanity. Witty, inspiring and provocative ✨
July 3, 2023
Tore through this - loved Emma’s perspective on motherhood and reading about her experiences as a Māori medical student. Essential reading.
August 14, 2023
It's alright.
September 8, 2023
Inspiring legend
July 5, 2023
Multiple reasons to devour this book down- the struggle for Maori inclusion, the state of NZ Health system, the story of a middle class Kiwi family or challenges of motherhood across generations. Superb writing by Emma!
July 5, 2023
Zoomed through it, which isn't really fair to a thoughtful, beautiful and current book.
June 24, 2023
I think Emma Espiner is great and I loved her writing. There were many different aspects of things that she talked about in this - relationships/ motherhood/ how we might do health better. Recommend (and a quick read too)
November 16, 2024
Loved the writing style and incredibly thought provoking. A must read for understanding health in Aotearoa. Fuel to my fire.
October 9, 2023
So good! Powerful, witty and so very Emma. Love it.
July 30, 2023
Interesting read in that it talks to the process Emma went through in moving from a journalism career to medicine and how her identity as a Māori was key to this.
A easy read that left me wanting to know / read / learn more
A easy read that left me wanting to know / read / learn more
September 17, 2024
Well written. An interesting read. Thought provoking at times.
October 31, 2023
Rated 7/10 I enjoyed this book in parts, not so much the earlier parts which seem to be full of contradictions in many ways, whereas the latter part talks of working at Middlemore Hospital with the challenges of becoming a junior doctor and the pressures they face.
Emma Espiner is obviously a smart lady as you have to be to become a doctor. Having lived for some time with a journalist I’m sure her writing skills have been honed. However the contradictions in the earlier parts of the book do tend to detract from her story.
She talks of her family’s heritage, her grandparents, parents and herself have all had “mixed marriages”, ie a Maori and Pakeha marriage. She briefly mentions her Irish and Scottish ancestry, but there after her life is looked at from a Maori perspective and perceived wrongs.
She talks about wanting to achieve as a student, but then talks of getting involved with alcohol and drugs.
She talks of inequalities in opportunities and that Maori were considered “dumb” and missed on opportunities in education, then writes of almost disbelief that her father had been sent by his parents to a white Catholic school for his education and he must have hated going there.
She writes of university where her opportunities were the same as others but hard partying didn’t always help the cause.
She writes of being the only “brown face in the room” in some of her jobs, yet seems unhappy to be earning in excess of $100,000 annually as if she shouldn’t be.
She talks of poverty within Maori and Pasifika groups, but seems to struggle to live on the above salary.
She talks of lost/limited opportunities for Maori/Pasifika on a race basis in the medical profession which she applies herself to. At the same time she seems surprised by feelings of ill will towards her when she enters medical school through a Maori/Pasifika programme that is race based as opposed to those who lost out academically. (There is certainly a need for more Maori/Pasifika medical staff and I fully appreciate the opportunity they are given as once entering med school they have to perform or they are out).
She writes of the need for more Maori doctors who feel empathy for their patients who are afraid of going to hospital as it is seen as somewhere you go to die. Perhaps she fails to notice that this feeling is something not specific to Maori.
She talks of the need for a Maori health scheme wanting to have half hour patient consults to better understand their patients, yet is presumably is happy that anyone else is set a 10 minute time allowance for a doctor consult due to the work pressure they are under.
The fact that she managed to juggle a family and study to become a doctor later in life than some is to be applauded and I for one certainly wish her well in her most recent vocation.
Emma Espiner is obviously a smart lady as you have to be to become a doctor. Having lived for some time with a journalist I’m sure her writing skills have been honed. However the contradictions in the earlier parts of the book do tend to detract from her story.
She talks of her family’s heritage, her grandparents, parents and herself have all had “mixed marriages”, ie a Maori and Pakeha marriage. She briefly mentions her Irish and Scottish ancestry, but there after her life is looked at from a Maori perspective and perceived wrongs.
She talks about wanting to achieve as a student, but then talks of getting involved with alcohol and drugs.
She talks of inequalities in opportunities and that Maori were considered “dumb” and missed on opportunities in education, then writes of almost disbelief that her father had been sent by his parents to a white Catholic school for his education and he must have hated going there.
She writes of university where her opportunities were the same as others but hard partying didn’t always help the cause.
She writes of being the only “brown face in the room” in some of her jobs, yet seems unhappy to be earning in excess of $100,000 annually as if she shouldn’t be.
She talks of poverty within Maori and Pasifika groups, but seems to struggle to live on the above salary.
She talks of lost/limited opportunities for Maori/Pasifika on a race basis in the medical profession which she applies herself to. At the same time she seems surprised by feelings of ill will towards her when she enters medical school through a Maori/Pasifika programme that is race based as opposed to those who lost out academically. (There is certainly a need for more Maori/Pasifika medical staff and I fully appreciate the opportunity they are given as once entering med school they have to perform or they are out).
She writes of the need for more Maori doctors who feel empathy for their patients who are afraid of going to hospital as it is seen as somewhere you go to die. Perhaps she fails to notice that this feeling is something not specific to Maori.
She talks of the need for a Maori health scheme wanting to have half hour patient consults to better understand their patients, yet is presumably is happy that anyone else is set a 10 minute time allowance for a doctor consult due to the work pressure they are under.
The fact that she managed to juggle a family and study to become a doctor later in life than some is to be applauded and I for one certainly wish her well in her most recent vocation.
May 4, 2023
This a beautifully written book, so much so that I was very annoyed at Emma for being able to write this well. One moment you're reading a delightful turn of phrase, the next moment she drops the F bomb, and both of these seem absolutely true to who Emma is as a person.
She articulates truths so precisely and deftly that you immediately recognise them as truths, while simultaneously going, huh, I've never heard anyone talk about that before. That's what the best writing does, right? Lifts things to the surface.
One of her biggest achievements with this book, I thought, was being able to articulate what it's like to go through med school and become a doctor (with the background of COVID-19 on top of everything else) – you worry for her while your admiration for her and any doctor shoots through the roof, and you wonder how on earth she does it. Being a doctor has a parallel to being a parent, I think, in that it's easy to articulate all the bad things about being a parent, but really hard to capture why you actually chose this life, and love it, to someone on the outside. But Emma does it so well, and I would read a whole book about her daily life as a doctor (or, TV series... just saying).
This book is also a lovely tribute to her family; her mum and her daughter in particular, and the love jumps off the page (but in Emma's matter-of-fact way – no soppiness to be found here). It's also a really revealing and important look at the inequities Māori face whenever they brush up against our health system, but also in a broader societal sense in Aotearoa.
Can't wait to see what she does next (hopefully it's a nap)
She articulates truths so precisely and deftly that you immediately recognise them as truths, while simultaneously going, huh, I've never heard anyone talk about that before. That's what the best writing does, right? Lifts things to the surface.
One of her biggest achievements with this book, I thought, was being able to articulate what it's like to go through med school and become a doctor (with the background of COVID-19 on top of everything else) – you worry for her while your admiration for her and any doctor shoots through the roof, and you wonder how on earth she does it. Being a doctor has a parallel to being a parent, I think, in that it's easy to articulate all the bad things about being a parent, but really hard to capture why you actually chose this life, and love it, to someone on the outside. But Emma does it so well, and I would read a whole book about her daily life as a doctor (or, TV series... just saying).
This book is also a lovely tribute to her family; her mum and her daughter in particular, and the love jumps off the page (but in Emma's matter-of-fact way – no soppiness to be found here). It's also a really revealing and important look at the inequities Māori face whenever they brush up against our health system, but also in a broader societal sense in Aotearoa.
Can't wait to see what she does next (hopefully it's a nap)
June 27, 2025
Medicine confers on those who practise it the knowledge of how their loved ones will die.
They reference each other and open up worlds, connecting us with thinkers across time and space. We can see that naming thing is activism. To cite is to be seen, and our Indigenous academics are disestablishing colonial knowledge systems, which shut our knowledge out, by citing whakapapa, science through oral history, stories that form our evidence even as they master the tools of the coloniser and set about creating something better.
After two year, I don't think that the challenge is to preserve out humanity, as many people exhort us to do, but to find a way to cultivate optimism, and to find enough space in the madness to be there for each other. The intensity of the relationships formed in the acuity of a hospital is intoxicating. I love medicine so much because it's an endless source of people and stories and community, constantly changing.
Even outside of public advocacy for health issues, the practice of medicine is fundamentally storytelling.
Our patients certainly don't come to us with the expectation that they will be a mirror for our own shit, or inspiration for our lives, but they are nonetheless, and it's the same with great writing.
I don't know if we can fix all the things that are wrong with the way we practise medicine by storytelling. But I am certain that, without it, there won't be any words to describe what we want for our patients and for ourselves, and no record of how we tried.
They reference each other and open up worlds, connecting us with thinkers across time and space. We can see that naming thing is activism. To cite is to be seen, and our Indigenous academics are disestablishing colonial knowledge systems, which shut our knowledge out, by citing whakapapa, science through oral history, stories that form our evidence even as they master the tools of the coloniser and set about creating something better.
After two year, I don't think that the challenge is to preserve out humanity, as many people exhort us to do, but to find a way to cultivate optimism, and to find enough space in the madness to be there for each other. The intensity of the relationships formed in the acuity of a hospital is intoxicating. I love medicine so much because it's an endless source of people and stories and community, constantly changing.
Even outside of public advocacy for health issues, the practice of medicine is fundamentally storytelling.
Our patients certainly don't come to us with the expectation that they will be a mirror for our own shit, or inspiration for our lives, but they are nonetheless, and it's the same with great writing.
I don't know if we can fix all the things that are wrong with the way we practise medicine by storytelling. But I am certain that, without it, there won't be any words to describe what we want for our patients and for ourselves, and no record of how we tried.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews