Reviews for Life After Psychotherapy

The average rating for Life After Psychotherapy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-03 00:00:00 Brandon Low Things that you should find worrisome if a doctor says them to you or a loved one: * "We see this sometimes" when said about a case that has some atypical features. The doctor is basically telling you that s/he has stopped thinking. * "There's nothing wrong with you." Even if your problems are psychogenic, they're still problems, and you are still suffering. Things you can say to your doctor to help him/her with your case: - "What's the worst this could be?" - "Is it possible that I have more than one problem?" - "Let me tell you what is really frightening me." - "Can I tell you the story again as if you'd never heard it? Is it possible that I left out something important that I don't realize is important?" - "When you say 'improvement,' do you mean 'cure'?" - "How likely is this test to have a false positive rating? What about a false negative rating?" - "Are you doing this procedure because you are confident it will work, or are you doing it because you don't know what else to do?" - "Do you need more time to think about this? Do you want to call or e-mail me, or should I schedule another appointment?" Other interesting information from this book: • Studies show that the sicker you are, the more likely your doctor is to dislike you. Sad but true. • Patients seen as "noncompliant" are also generally disliked. Doctors notice an apparent refusal to follow diet, exercise, and medication regimes but do not always realize that other factors (such as illiteracy) may be the reason for noncompliance. • Other studies show that a doctor will interrupt a patient describing symptoms within 18 seconds. • People tend to think that ER doctors can give a complete physical exam and tell them that they're completely healthy, but ER doctors are more focused on making sure that whatever may be wrong with you does not kill you in the next three days. Excellent and thoughtful book, but I subtracted one star for a minor problem: Dr. Groopman always uses "he" when referring to doctors in general. This made me crazy because he's trying to note differences in older and younger doctors, and I think a rather substantial difference is that about half of younger doctors are female. Also, many of the most successful and thoughtful doctors he interviews are female. Also, HE IS MARRIED TO A FEMALE DOCTOR. Arrgh. (He refers to patients in general as "they.") This kind of sexism is so easy to edit out, but nobody bothered, and it rankles that nobody at the publishing company advised him that well over half the book-buying audience is female.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-29 00:00:00 Charles Heinrich Everyone needs to be their own advocate for their health care. A good first step is to understand how doctors think, and that's what this book attempts to do. The book generally focuses on the problem of incorrect diagnoses. Following each example of incorrect diagnosis there is an analysis of the reasons why the errors were made. Then the authors suggests ways doctors and patients can avoid similar problems in the future. There are numerous ideas and suggestions for patients to use in improving their chances of being correctly diagnosed. Generally speaking my reaction to most of the examples in the book was that the docors are human, and they can slip up occasionally. The book suggests that doctors are correct about 85% of the time. (Incidentally, that's about the same rate of accuracy as modern weather forecasting.) What I was most alarmed to learn about was how inaccurate radiologist and pathologists were. After hearing the accuracy rates for those professions, I think it to be unwise to allow a serious operation be performed based upon the test results reported by a single radiologist or pathologists. The author is a doctor himself. One of the most interesting examples in the book was his own personal story of finding a solution for pain in his right hand. I lost count, but I think he visited about six different specialists trying to find a solution to the problem. I noticed that his wife, who's also a doctor, insisted on coming along to some of the visits with doctors to make sure her husband would ask the corrrect questions. He used his medical connections to get in to see what are considered to be the top experts in the nation, and even he was unhappy with the way he was treated. If he wasn't happy, imagine what happens to the rest of us. In the end he had a surgery done that gave him 80% full use of his hand, a bit short of perfection. However, if he had gone forward with about 4 of the 6 proposed operations, the result would have either been no improvement or maybe ending up in a worse condition. The following is the review from my PageADay Book Lover's calendar: Nobody's perfect, not even your doctor. But most doctors get most diagnoses right most of the time. Jerome Groopman, Harvard Professor of Medicine and essayist for The New Yorker, examines those times when things go wrong. The questions Groopman asks are crucial: What assumptions do doctors make about patients that lead to misdiagnoses? And what can you, the patient, do to help your doctor think clearly and avoid fatal jumps to conclusions? This is one book that can definitely improve your health.