Hippocrates' Shadow: Secrets from the House of Medicine Book

I hadn't expected a book examining problems with modern medicine to be such a page-turner, but the author lived up to his promise to reveal "secrets from the house of medicine," and some of them are doozies.

David Newman is a specialist in emergency medicine, and he combines stories from his practice with hard data to highlight the many places where things can go wrong in the doctor-patient relationship. In chapters with titles such as "We Don't Know," "It Doesn't Work," and "We Don't Agree," Newman reveals that modern medicine is still very much in its infancy, and he makes a compelling argument that the practice of good doctoring requires not just science but also a significant amount of art. Newman talks at length about how this more human side of medicine has been lost in a flurry of often unnecessary tests and procedures and discusses how this focus contributes to the decline of satisfaction of not just patients but also of doctors themselves.

Throughout the course of the book, Newman gives numerous fascinating examples of medical interventions that are proven ineffective and yet still routinely given, and this education alone was for me worth the price of the book. I walked away from it with a much better understanding of what my doctors can and can't do for me, how medical decisions are made, more realistic expectations of the results I may get, and more confidence to be an active participant in my own health care decisions.

I found all of the above so valuable I was all set to give this book five stars when Newman made an abrupt left turn in the last chapter that gave me serious pause. Specifically, he comes to the conclusion that the problems of modern medicine are the result of a near religious belief in science. Though this makes sense in the context of doctors paying more attention to unreliable and subjective diagnostic tests than patients themselves, it directly contradicts the numerous examples he gives of doctors making poor treatment choices because they are blatantly ignoring hard scientific data that contradicts their long-established beliefs. Given how complex the problems woven into our medical system are, I can understand Newman's desire to end the book with a simple summary of a core problem. But in ending the book with such a broad swipe at science, he diminishes the numerous other problems he so eloquently outlined earlier in the book in favor of the kind of black and white answer he had done such a good job of showing us it is unrealistic to expect.