Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine Book

In an instance of why judging a book by its cover would be wrong, I nearly didn't purchase this book when I saw it at the store. The author bears a strong resemblance to a couple professors I knew in college who were still living in the hippie mindset, and coupled with the title's reference to the 'art of medicine', I was concerned she was a new age practitioner who would be talking about her unconventional methods of doctoring. However, it couldn't be farther from the truth, and is one of the better physician autobiographies I read in a long time.
As she notes at the end of the book (don't worry, not a spoiler), some of the stories she tells were written in real time, as she was actually seeing and treating the patients she refers to. Might be the first such book where the patients contribute to the editing. Ofri is normally a clinic physician, so I'd say about 3/4 of the stories are about the patients she sees from all walks of life, on an outpatient basis, while the others are patients she sees on her month long stints covering an inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Not all of the outpatient stories come from her New York clinic, as there are some from the early part of the book when she was trying to figure out where to settle down and did fill-in work in doctor's offices very different from the multicultural, often low-income population she sees at Bellevue. There are also some reflections from her days as a doctor in training as they apply to the current patient whose stories she is telling.
Overall, I thought it was a very well-balanced book, which begins and ends with Ofri's own experience as a patient in her medical network when she was expecting her first child and some of the chapters also include related stories about her family members when they parallel a work experience. While I of course wish it was longer, I didn't get the feeling of incompleteness I sometimes feel after reading a book that could be twice as long as it actually is. Perhaps it's because she alludes to her first book a couple times, one I'm sure to read, if I haven't already.