Books &Medicine Entropy | 23 Sep 2011
Mindfulness in Medicine
“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing”– Voltaire
Becoming Mindful Of Medical Decision Making..
Even the youngest among us have had to make difficult medical decisions. Perhaps we’ve had to choose between two doctors with very different opinions, or decide whether to treat a condition with a pill or with diet, exercise and natural remedies. Some of us have had to make even bigger decisions and help loved ones do the same. Medical treatment is seldom free and often expensive, deciding how to treat a health condition can be nearly as taxing as the condition itself.
Adding to the pressure is the fact that many of us are seen by doctors who don’t have the time to properly help us weigh our options.
This complex and often exasperating reality is the driving force behind Your Medical Mind, a collaboration between Dr. Jerome Groopman, the oncologist, New Yorker staff writer and author of the How Doctors Think, and his wife Pamela Hartzband, an endocrinologist and equally sharp observer of the medical world. The quest of this conscientious pair is to shed more light on how our minds approach medicine and, using real patients’ stories, to help us make appropriate choices when it’s demanded of us.
Part psychological study and part self-help book, Your Medical Mind doesn’t provide answers but, rather, insights into navigating the increasingly daunting and dysfunctional world of medicine.
We are dealing with an “uncertain science,” as the authors call medicine, in a situation where an “exact science” would be so much more helpful. Certainly, Groopman and Hartzband would hate to see medicine into “mathematics.” In their refreshing view, the individuality of the patient should be valued above all else, and embracing the vagaries of medicine, rather than trying to standardize it, is the key to better treatment and better health.
Treating the patient as an individual — and not as a statistic or algorithm to be solved — is vitally important, says Groopman, because the best and safest care might not always be standardized.
Jerome Groopman, M.D., and Pamela Hartzband, M.D., are on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and on the staff of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both in Boston. They have collaborated on several articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New England Journal of Medicine among other publications.
on 23 Sep 2011 at 5:11 pm 1.Sandy said …
Ajay, Thank you for this! As always, your blog provides thoughtful, poetic, informative reflections. Whenever I hear a pharmaceutical ad listing the side effects of a medication, I cringe. The last on the list is often “death.”
Studies in the States show that up to 60% of patients who visit HMO’s are undiagnosable and doctors are labeling them the “Worried well.” A Canadian study estimates that 40% of chronic illness can be prevented. Epidemiological studies indicate that 25% of all direct medical costs – or nearly $9.7 billion (C$2002) a year in Canadian costs of chronic diseases – are attributable to a small number of excess risk factors such as smoking, obesity, physical inactivity, and poor nutrition.
I am eager to read this book and I continue to hold the vision that people can awaken their capacity to influence their own health and well-being to the greatest degree possible.
Bowing and smiling,
Sandy