Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries

Description

A collection of more than fifty hard-to-crack medical quandaries, featuring the best of The New York Times Magazine's popular Diagnosis column--the inspiration for the upcoming Netflix original series "Lisa Sanders is a paragon of the modern medical detective storyteller."--Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the New York Times bestselling author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all. And yet she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians struggle to diagnose. A twenty-eight-year-old man, vacationing in the Bahamas for his birthday, tries some barracuda for dinner. Hours later, he collapses on the dance floor with crippling stomach pains. A middle-aged woman returns to her doctor, after visiting two days earlier with a mild rash on the back of her hands. Now the rash has turned purple and has spread across her entire body in whiplike streaks. A young elephant trainer in a traveling circus, once head-butted by a rogue zebra, is suddenly beset with splitting headaches, as if someone were "slamming a door inside his head." In each of these cases, the path to diagnosis--and treatment--is winding, sometimes frustratingly unclear. Dr. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck. Intricate, gripping, and full of twists and turns, Diagnosis puts readers in the doctor's place. It lets them see what doctors see, feel the uncertainty they feel--and experience the thrill when the puzzle is finally solved. Review: A page-turner - If you like medical mysteries this is for you. The style of the writing carries you along and I had cut short one afternoon so that I could get back to carry on reading. I only wish it was much, much longer. I read it on Kindle so I can't estimate how many pages it had. All the medical mysteries were explained as the medics got to grips with the various tests, without being overly complicated for the lay person. I will have to seek out any other titles from this author. Review: Nice small chapters, pretty good read - Nice small chapters which allows you to read but without having to read big chunks before putting it down to do jobs, it was interesting also.