How Doctors Think

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing his symptoms within twelve seconds, in that short time, manydoctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong-with catastrophic consequences. In this mythshattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err, and shows when and how they can--with our help-avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty,communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that call profoundly impact our health. A doctor's specialty, the technology he relies on, his age andhis emotional state can all produce different sorts of mistakes,and few doctors are trained to think about how they think-torecognize when their cognition is going astray. This book is thefirst to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking, offering direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. In unraveling the sources of faulty diagnosis and treatment,Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviewswith some of the country's best doctors and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice. giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

Jerome Groopman, M.D., holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. A staff writer for The New Yorker, he is the author of How Doctors Think, The Anatomy of Hope, Second Opinions, The Measure of Our Days, and other books.