Laws Of Medicine

A must read for anyone in medicine

Not worth the price. It's a short and small book of 70 pages. A TED original

Good

From the three laws the author announces, two should suffice to change the way doctor works and patients expect them to work: 1) A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weak test. 2) For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias If these two laws were persistently applied, medicine would cost us much less not only in money, but also in despair and suffering. I am among those who believe that lab test have been used more often to obfuscate medical ignorance than to help patients. And medical experiments, especially with expensive drugs and expensive medical procedures are much prone to enrich doctors and ameliorate Big Pharma bottom line than to help patients. After reading this short book everyone will the able to better understand why much of what we hear about expensive drugs and sophisticated medical procedure are injuring us, killing us and making us poorer. Everyone will also understand why intuition is an attribute so necessary in the art of healing. I recommend this book for everyone who thinks good medicine means tens of expensive lab tests followed by a long prescription of modern and expensive drugs. For these people, this book might save their lives. Or, at least save them big bucks.

To start off, this is a short, small book. It's also written for a general public. It's also not definitive, because we can't be definitive about this subject. Having said all that, it's a great book! I was trained as a research oncologist and stay current with the medical literature, but one of the tough aspects of that profession is explaining to people why they have developed a particular disease, why we don't know that much about it, and what might (or might not) help. Hope is something that's dangerous: hope can help heal, but hope can be dashed with consequences for the patient. Knowing what information to give someone, and how to phrase it, is a crucial if awkward part of any doctor's job. More than anything, this is a book that tries to explain, in layman terms (without being too simplistic or condescending) why we don't know as much as we should. This book is wide-ranging, covering subjects from history to philosophy, and how they overlap with the medical world. More than anything, this is a book about why "average" or "typical" isn't average or typical, and doesn't help science as much as the exceptions or outliers do. There's some interesting concepts brought up in the process, all of which are thought-provoking. I'm not going to go into detail on the contents of the book, simply because this is a book that's easy and fast to read, and reading it is an important aspect of the process of understanding the subject. This isn't just informative for non-medical people; this should be read by every doctor or researcher. Reading helps clarify some of the issues we encounter, and how best to broach them.

A concise, engaging and well-written thesis on some of the key principles of medicine, integrating wider aspects of science and clinical examples. As a medical student I found it pithily relevant to the profession which I am stepping into and a must read for fellow medics.

El libro es cortito pero muy interesante

regalato a mio figlio