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Second Opinions
Explores the art and science of the decision-making process amid the complexities of contemporary medicine and describes how such factors as the realities of medical politics and patient intuition play a key role in critical medical decisions
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Jerome Groopman
20 books130 followersWhen Dr. Groopman is not in his laboratory at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he is chief of experimental medicine, he focuses his expertise as a hematologist and oncologist as well as his compassion on the inner workings of his patients. It is this unusual nexus of medicine, healing and faith in the preciousness of life that characterizes Dr. Groopman’s career and core being. At age 44, Dr. Groopman turned his gentle yet meticulous lens to writing about his patients’ courage, endurance and resilience.
Though he considers himself a scientist and physician first, his eloquent pen captures the pace and pathos of medical mysteries and human dramas. The Measure of Our Days (Penguin) was published to critical acclaim and inspired the ABC television drama Gideon’s Crossing. In 1998, The New Yorker asked Dr. Groopman to become a staff writer in medicine and biology.
Though he considers himself a scientist and physician first, his eloquent pen captures the pace and pathos of medical mysteries and human dramas. The Measure of Our Days (Penguin) was published to critical acclaim and inspired the ABC television drama Gideon’s Crossing. In 1998, The New Yorker asked Dr. Groopman to become a staff writer in medicine and biology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
April 10, 2012
This thought provoking and often disturbing book should come with a warning. It will make you question the judgment of your doctor if you or someone you know is ever faced with diagnosis and treatment of a life-threatening illness. Medical science and technology continue to make great strides forward, but following each of the case histories related by Dr. Groopman in this book, you realize how tenuous is the judgment of individual doctors who must advise patients and lead them to decisions affecting their health.
Reason, in the delivery of health care, is balanced against intuition, and intuition can take many forms, including doubt, egoism, professional jealousy, impatience, resistance, and anger, all of which appear at one time or another in the stories Groopman tells. Or, as one of his patients says, intuition is reason operating below the level of awareness. Making life-saving decisions is, we realize, a matter of expert guess work, and if there's a lesson here it's that the best guess work comes from intimate knowledge of the patient, which the cost-saving constraints of managed health care often prohibit.
I recommend this book for anyone wondering how much trust to put in the medical profession. A well trained and experienced doctor can still make the difference between life and death, but Groopman shows how patients need to play an active role in decisions about their own health, and that often involves seeking a second opinion and making a choice between incompatible courses of action.
Reason, in the delivery of health care, is balanced against intuition, and intuition can take many forms, including doubt, egoism, professional jealousy, impatience, resistance, and anger, all of which appear at one time or another in the stories Groopman tells. Or, as one of his patients says, intuition is reason operating below the level of awareness. Making life-saving decisions is, we realize, a matter of expert guess work, and if there's a lesson here it's that the best guess work comes from intimate knowledge of the patient, which the cost-saving constraints of managed health care often prohibit.
I recommend this book for anyone wondering how much trust to put in the medical profession. A well trained and experienced doctor can still make the difference between life and death, but Groopman shows how patients need to play an active role in decisions about their own health, and that often involves seeking a second opinion and making a choice between incompatible courses of action.
February 29, 2012
Groopman is among the best physicians writing about the emotions and ethics and gray areas of medicine. This book is not simply eight dramas. They are examples of how patients defy the odds, of both survival and death, in ways science and medicine cannot fully understand, or predict. This is why medicine is an art, which requires honesty, empathy and incredible intuition. Groopman is compassion personified. He has come to his wisdom and humility in part through errors he pushed in care of his own injuries. I have long believed that health care directives are necessary, but too few of us understand how they may play out. Nothing in medicine is simple. It bears reflection that many doctors, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece, often avoid protracted medical treatments http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001... I am not saying they are correct, but it is always interesting to watch the most knowledgeable in the field vote with their feet.
April 14, 2020
This memoir/nonfiction collection is very interesting. Each chapter describes one of Dr. Groopman's patients: the presenting symptoms, the diagnosis, the treatment, and the prognosis. Dr. Groopman shows the intersection of the patients' history with the medical team's experiences, knowledge, and preconceived notions. Layered onto those factors are other human situations such as doctors' fatigue affecting their judgment and decision-making ability.
The only reason that I give this book four stars is that it was published in 1999, and I am certain that information relating to diagnoses and treatment is dated. However, it is still an excellent read.
Dr. Groopman writes beautifully, with great description of his patients and their family members. I especially enjoyed the chapters about members of his own family, which conveyed such warmth and compassion.
The only reason that I give this book four stars is that it was published in 1999, and I am certain that information relating to diagnoses and treatment is dated. However, it is still an excellent read.
Dr. Groopman writes beautifully, with great description of his patients and their family members. I especially enjoyed the chapters about members of his own family, which conveyed such warmth and compassion.
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May 16, 2021Written in 2000 by an esteemed clinician at Harvard ; written for the non-medical public. Though the science , genetics and oncology treatment protocols would have changed, the heartbeat of ethical decision making based on integrity and good patient care remains as important lessons for us.
2 good quotes that illustrates the beauty and the tensions in being a caring doctor :
A) About the unseen - "Blood is one of the most aesthetic tissues. Its beauty had seduced me into choosing haematology as a first career. The cells on the slide are like dancers in a grand ball ... the whole patient sometimes revealed in a single a drop of his blood ( having doen blood smears when younger ( from page 108).
Appreciate this line as have I had to work through a microscope to look at hundreds of blood films on glass sides some 30 years ago.
B) About his team of junior fellows residents and medical students, telling a patient who was unhappy at having to be displayed before the "United Nations" (the team is from diverse backgrounds) : " And the team that stands before you - I check on them, and believe me, they check on me, even though I am the boss. These young doctors and students are not passive yes-men and -women. They are taught to challenge their seniors ... to think on their own (page 119)
Am glad that HMOs don't run the healthcare in my region.
Hope that doctors - as the good professor does - see colleagues as complimentary to patient care and not as a threat or as a competitor.
The chapter that I like best is "Dont Just Do Something - Stand There"
2 good quotes that illustrates the beauty and the tensions in being a caring doctor :
A) About the unseen - "Blood is one of the most aesthetic tissues. Its beauty had seduced me into choosing haematology as a first career. The cells on the slide are like dancers in a grand ball ... the whole patient sometimes revealed in a single a drop of his blood ( having doen blood smears when younger ( from page 108).
Appreciate this line as have I had to work through a microscope to look at hundreds of blood films on glass sides some 30 years ago.
B) About his team of junior fellows residents and medical students, telling a patient who was unhappy at having to be displayed before the "United Nations" (the team is from diverse backgrounds) : " And the team that stands before you - I check on them, and believe me, they check on me, even though I am the boss. These young doctors and students are not passive yes-men and -women. They are taught to challenge their seniors ... to think on their own (page 119)
Am glad that HMOs don't run the healthcare in my region.
Hope that doctors - as the good professor does - see colleagues as complimentary to patient care and not as a threat or as a competitor.
The chapter that I like best is "Dont Just Do Something - Stand There"
August 5, 2019
Engrossing medical stories
Yes, Dr. Groopman does have a rather elevated opinion of himself, and yes, this book serves admirably as self-promotion, but, so what? Dr. Groopman's inability to assume a socially correct humility may be annoying and distracting to some, but I found it amusing and almost endearing. He wants so much to please and be that delight of mothers everywhere, "my son, the doctor," that it is impossible for him to show himself in an unflattering light. Even when he volunteers his mistakes, one has the sense that he is a larger person for having done so!
Well, I can think of worse styles, and anyway, what is important about this book is not the author's self-perception, but the light he sheds on the practice of medicine for the reader, and that light is considerable. He has a fine gift for telling a story and he writes in a clear and vivid manner that is easy to read, and we are thoroughly engrossed . Furthermore, the moral of most of the very interesting stories he presents here from his practice, is that the physician's first responsibility is to the patient, not to his ego, not to his career, not to the HMOs, and not even to his fellow physicians.
I was particularly impressed with Dr. Groopman's ability to criticize those physicians who let their egos and their pride come before their patients. He wasn't afraid to show how doctors who do not put the welfare of their patients first can cause pain and suffering and even death. Most doctors would never come close to being as critical of their peers as Groopman is here. I don't know whether he has an inordinate amount of courage, or a particularly thick skin, but I do know that many doctors will not be pleased with what he has revealed in these pages about the competence of some physicians, and he will pay a price for that.
Also impressive was Dr. Groopman's unflinching willingness to share with the reader not just his clinical experience, but his personal experience as well. In the first chapter, "Our Firstborn Son," he and his wife, who is also a doctor, become worried parents who take their sick son to the emergency room of a hospital, feeling as vulnerable and helpless as any other parents would, especially when they become concerned that the doctor on call is misdiagnosing their son's illness. In a later chapter he shares the story of his Grandfather Max who suffered from Alzheimer's disease in a way that made him uncontrollably violent. Most significant, though, is the story he tells about himself in the prologue. It is disarming in the sense that he too is guilty of pride and suffers most painfully for it. Once a marathon runner, he ends up crippled for a year, and to this day has a chronic debility that limits his mobility, all because he thought he knew better than the doctors who were treating him. It was a great and painful lesson for a young physician, the kind of lesson that molds us to better appreciate our limits and to empathize with the suffering of others, the kind of lesson that shapes a great physician.
So, I don't believe Dr. Groopman is ensconced in any ivory tower. He is a physician that is intimately involved in the welfare of his patients (and in his research), a man who understands the suffering patients go through first hand, and is sympathetic and, most important, knowledgeable and skillful. He is also a very good writer. I would be delighted to be so lucky as to have Dr. Groopman as my personal physician.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Yes, Dr. Groopman does have a rather elevated opinion of himself, and yes, this book serves admirably as self-promotion, but, so what? Dr. Groopman's inability to assume a socially correct humility may be annoying and distracting to some, but I found it amusing and almost endearing. He wants so much to please and be that delight of mothers everywhere, "my son, the doctor," that it is impossible for him to show himself in an unflattering light. Even when he volunteers his mistakes, one has the sense that he is a larger person for having done so!
Well, I can think of worse styles, and anyway, what is important about this book is not the author's self-perception, but the light he sheds on the practice of medicine for the reader, and that light is considerable. He has a fine gift for telling a story and he writes in a clear and vivid manner that is easy to read, and we are thoroughly engrossed . Furthermore, the moral of most of the very interesting stories he presents here from his practice, is that the physician's first responsibility is to the patient, not to his ego, not to his career, not to the HMOs, and not even to his fellow physicians.
I was particularly impressed with Dr. Groopman's ability to criticize those physicians who let their egos and their pride come before their patients. He wasn't afraid to show how doctors who do not put the welfare of their patients first can cause pain and suffering and even death. Most doctors would never come close to being as critical of their peers as Groopman is here. I don't know whether he has an inordinate amount of courage, or a particularly thick skin, but I do know that many doctors will not be pleased with what he has revealed in these pages about the competence of some physicians, and he will pay a price for that.
Also impressive was Dr. Groopman's unflinching willingness to share with the reader not just his clinical experience, but his personal experience as well. In the first chapter, "Our Firstborn Son," he and his wife, who is also a doctor, become worried parents who take their sick son to the emergency room of a hospital, feeling as vulnerable and helpless as any other parents would, especially when they become concerned that the doctor on call is misdiagnosing their son's illness. In a later chapter he shares the story of his Grandfather Max who suffered from Alzheimer's disease in a way that made him uncontrollably violent. Most significant, though, is the story he tells about himself in the prologue. It is disarming in the sense that he too is guilty of pride and suffers most painfully for it. Once a marathon runner, he ends up crippled for a year, and to this day has a chronic debility that limits his mobility, all because he thought he knew better than the doctors who were treating him. It was a great and painful lesson for a young physician, the kind of lesson that molds us to better appreciate our limits and to empathize with the suffering of others, the kind of lesson that shapes a great physician.
So, I don't believe Dr. Groopman is ensconced in any ivory tower. He is a physician that is intimately involved in the welfare of his patients (and in his research), a man who understands the suffering patients go through first hand, and is sympathetic and, most important, knowledgeable and skillful. He is also a very good writer. I would be delighted to be so lucky as to have Dr. Groopman as my personal physician.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
January 29, 2020
For a woman who has very little understanding of the world of medicine, I found this book surprisingly fascinating. Dr. Groopman shares 8 true stories of highly risky clinical decision making in language that the average person can comprehend (though trying to read some of the medical terms aloud is humorous, ha).
This book is great to pass the time or learn a bit about Alzheimer’s, hematology, oncology, etc. So if you’re into those medical drama tv shows, it might be for you. Grab some tacos and have a read.
This book is great to pass the time or learn a bit about Alzheimer’s, hematology, oncology, etc. So if you’re into those medical drama tv shows, it might be for you. Grab some tacos and have a read.
April 13, 2018
Interesting variety of cases in which doctor intuition for treatment went against medical norms. I appreciated how honest this doctor was about his own struggles, on the whole but especially with needing to 'fix things.' Whether or not patients were cured in the end, it felt like a growth experience for all parties.
October 31, 2019
In this modern world where nobody seems to have a general physician that you know and like and knows your health history, it is nice to hear a qualified voice assuring you when something goes wrong in your health it is not only acceptable but wise to have several medical opinions before selecting a method of treatment.
May 26, 2023
Very interesting tales of risk assessment and decision making, pitting doctor against doctor, patient against HMO, patient against time. A bit sad how much things seem to depend on knowing a good and well-resourced doctor, and how often insurance considerations prevent patients from getting what physicians would consider the best treatment.
February 22, 2023
Groopman is a respected medical professional in the Harvard Medical School.
Despite his lofty position in the medical world he maintains a firm hold on humanity and compassion. These traits, combined with his medical knowledge and skillful writing, make his books fascinating to read.
Despite his lofty position in the medical world he maintains a firm hold on humanity and compassion. These traits, combined with his medical knowledge and skillful writing, make his books fascinating to read.
September 4, 2019
I thought it was very well written. It was like watching a good House MD series. Despite having no background in medicine, the medical details were so interesting that I couldn't put it down.
December 29, 2019
The introduction was powerful. The other chapters I felt were New Yorker pieces.
November 6, 2007
These are interesting case studies about second opinions presented by a doctor. I have always enjoyed Jerome Groopman's articles in The New Yorker and this book was also fulfilling. One of Groopman's best traits as a writer/doctor is that he presents medical information in a manner that is accessible to the reader without oversimplifying it, i.e. I never feel that too much is lost in translation between the doctor and the layperson.
June 27, 2007
Wonderful book. This book made me buy two other books by Dr. Groopman. He is a very good author that blends story telling and medical science together without hazing past either. For a medical student this is a fun read because along with the stories comes real medical science that you can relate to.
December 9, 2008
Excellent book. Dr. Groopman truly encapsulates what it takes to be a real doctor: going beyond knowledge to meet the non-clinical needs of his patients. In addition, his vigilant reassessment of his decisions and judgements are an example for all those who partake in doctoring. Dr. Groopman is not merely a physician but also a healer!
April 30, 2011
groopman is a great journalist and storyteller, but (after reading two of his books) i'm not sure his books ever accomplish what they set out to. the stories in this book didn't, for me, illuminate medical decision-making; what they did was cast groopman as the medical hero. again, though, the stories were good and told well.
May 11, 2011
A great book written by an MD presenting case studies and the process of making decisions for critical care including the use of intuition. If Dr. Groopman is true to his written self, this is how I would like more doctors to be. Really Listening to their patients and using his own and their insight to progress with treatment.
December 13, 2011
A good, solid book. I'd gladly read Dr. Groopman's other offerings. Not surprisingly the author comes across as a kindly, diligent, open-minded doctor who happens to be a good listener, all of which are probably true. The eight stories are informative and provide some guidance for patients to take a more active role in their own care.
July 15, 2013
This was a good book but not as great as the How Doctors Think. In part the age of the book seemed to hinder it since it was written in the late part of the 1990s and medicine has moved forward quite a bit since then. It was a good book but not particularly outstanding. An easy read that is good when you don’t want to focus too hard.
August 29, 2008
Fascinating book illustrating a doctor's compassion and accompanying uncertainty of diagnosis and treatment in several cases (including himself and his infant son). He does come off as something of a hero but for me, the medical details were so interesting that I couldn't put it down.
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August 11, 2011Even if the book is 11 years old, it is still pertinent today. I could totally relate to Dr. Groopman's stories and explanations. In some, I could see similar circumstances I've experienced. I definitely recommend this book to my doctor friends & also to my non-doctor friends. Great read!
May 22, 2013
Groopmanis an MD who writes about some interesting cases where second opinions were sought with varying results. It was interesting to me to see the physician's point of view on these little dramas. It hightlighted some of the very dark corners that exist in the world of medical science.
August 5, 2013
How have I missed this book until now? Dr. Jerome Groopman is a compassionate, gifted writer. More to the point, the eight clinical dramas related in "Second Opinions" provide insight into the challenges of making difficult medical decisions.
November 28, 2007
Not as fantastic as Groopman's "How Doctor's Think," but a good read if you're looking for stories, rather facts & information.
April 28, 2008
Exactly what i was looking for.
October 5, 2008
Don't be afraid to question professionals. There is never a right answer, just a better answer. Get educated, ask questions. Have a doctor who will listen and advocate for you.
February 26, 2017
Groopman is a fantastic writer!
January 13, 2011
Not as good as his other books but still good
February 6, 2013
Dr. Groopman provides an interesting examination of how pride can hinder medical progress.
December 1, 2013
I enjoyed this book but remember that I love to read medicine books. I did find that the author went into too much detail about medical science; there was a lot that I could not follow.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews