Play Book Tag discussion

I think my main take-away from this book of essays by the gifted Dr. Atul Gawande is that medicine is not an exact science and surgeons, or doctors in general, are human and not infallible. I never thought of doctors as God but they were certainly high on a stack of pedestals. Gawande shows how disparate the decisions of treatment can be among any given group of doctors. It actually seems a bit frightening to me in that there is not one specific answer that will always fit the criteria for any one case. Of course, most attacks of appendicitis are exactly that and are treated the same. But sometimes it is not appendicitis even with all the expected symptoms present. What then? A good example in the book is the last patient discussed: a young woman presenting with an obvious case of cellulitis. Something niggling in the back of Gawande's mind suggested this was so much more. Could it be necrotizing fasciitis, "flesh-eating disease"? Even with biopsy it still looked like the highly treatable cellulitis but several doctors had the same uneasy feeling and, upon surgery, the leg was almost completely taken over by the deadly bacteria. The young woman's leg was spared as was her very life. Where does that unease come from; and thank goodness it does! The case studies in this book are fascinating and, no, not all of them have such dramatically happy endings. It is eye-opening and thought-provoking.

Ellen wrote: "I think my main take-away from this book of essays by the gifted Dr. Atul Gawande is that medicine is not an exact science and surgeons, or doctors in general, are human and not infallible. I never..."

What I was told by my retired surgeon father is that medicine is part art, part science. Obviously I have never put doctors on a pedestal as I grew up around them (but not only them, since there were almost no MDs there when we moved there and my parents had a very wide circle of friends--it was the sticks, so everything from loggers (there are some very well-read, intelligent ones!!) to MDs, to merchants to various and sundry other professions.

But back c. 1980 I heard someone bad mouthing their doctor (not my dad) because they performed an appendectomy on someone and it turned out to be something else. Well, before they could really look at your appendix, that surgery was the right call, because 99 percent of the time those symptoms were acute appendicitis and only a completely incompetent doctor wouldn't have ordered or performed an immediate appendectomy in that day.

To this day, it isn't as though each different disease or problem has its own exact set of symptoms that nothing else has (there are a few, of course), and even today, MS is diagnosed by a process of elimination (I know a few people with MS), as are other things.

So, doctors are neither gods nor demons, and no one should be putting them in these boxes.

All this said, I will say that my dad did have a bit of a God complex in the OR, but he wasn't so bad as to insist that he was always right--that sort of complex comes in many degrees! He doesn't have it in every facet of his life and he is FABULOUS with my mother who now has dementia--none of us kids would have predicted that he would be this amazing with her given his surgeon-personality, but he protects her and works with her--know the right things do do and does them.

This sounds like an excellent read, but I have read a fair bit of this sort of thing and so will pass on this one :)