Helen Plum Library

"Patients, anxious to convey their symptoms, feel an urgency to "make their case" to their doctors. Doctors, under pressure to be efficient, multitask while patients speak and often miss the key elements. Add in stereotypes, unconscious bias, conflicting agendas, and fear of lawsuits and the risk of misdiagnosis and medical errors multiplies dangerously. ... Reporting on the latest research studies and interviewing scholars, doctors, and patients,...

"From Chekhov to Maugham to William Carlos Williams, doctors have long given voice to their unique perspectives through literature. Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today's most beloved physician-writers, including, Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical...

Jury of his peers: Caroline Lomax is on jury duty and, by sheer coincidence, so is Ted Thomasson. She'd known him when she was twelve and he was fifteen. Back then, she thought he was obnoxious--and she hasn't changed her mind. But other things have changed. Ted's become very attractive, for one. And he certainly knows how to kiss. Now Ted wants Caroline to see him as more than a boy from her past. He wants her to see him as the man she'll marry Any...

A crime of unfathomable horror has a ripple-like effect on four profoundly different souls. Helen, a troubled inmate at Sloatsburg women's prison, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, has forsworn the Park Avenue practice for which she trained in favor of the chief of psychiatry job at Sloatsburg. Former New York City narcotics detective Ike Bradshaw is...

Germs sometimes make us sick, and sometimes we get hurt. Where do you go when that happens? The doctor! Find out how a doctor's visit keeps you healthy

"Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system"--

In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions...

The story of Dr. Faraday, the son of a housemaid, who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. During the long hot summer of 1948, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked. But it is now in decline and its inhabitants, a mother, son, and daughter, are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely the family's story is...

"We live in an age of medical miracles. Never in the history of humankind has so much talent and energy been harnessed to cure disease. So why does it feel like it's getting harder to live our healthiest lives? Why does it seem like "experts" can't agree on anything, and why do our interactions with medical professionals feel less personal, less honest, and less impactful than ever? Through stories from his own practice and historical case studies,...

Hank Lawson is a young E.R. doctor who, after being wrongly blamed for a patient's death, moves to the Hamptons and becomes the hot new "concierge doctor" in town. Though Hank is initially reluctant to embrace this new career, with encouragement from Evan and Divya, who volunteers to be his physician assistant, he decides to stay in town for the summer, once again solving medical crises and helping those in need