{"id":79,"date":"2005-09-20T21:44:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T21:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=79"},"modified":"2025-06-28T12:44:41","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T16:44:41","slug":"second-opinions-stories-of-intuition-and-choice-in-the-changing-world-of-medicine-jerome-groopman-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2005\/09\/second-opinions-stories-of-intuition-and-choice-in-the-changing-world-of-medicine-jerome-groopman-2000\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine &#8211; Jerome Groopman, 2000"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The medical mystery\/doctor&#8217;s experiences genre is a favorite of mine. This exemplar comes from one of the <em>New Yorker<\/em>&#8216;s stable of medical professionals who also write extremely well (where do they find them, I wonder? did <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Berton_Rouech%C3%A9\">Berton Rouech\u00e9<\/a> start a special school?) The most striking story is from the prologue: Groopman&#8217;s own experience of insisting on surgery so his lower-back problem could be &#8220;fixed&#8221; quickly. Refusing to listen to doctors who advised rest and &#8220;tincture of time,&#8221; he shopped around until he found surgeons to operate. As a result, the poor guy to this day has severe physical limitations (the reason he was so impatient originally was because he was in training for the Boston Marathon, so I can identify, but now he can&#8217;t run at all&#8230;) but also a refreshing humility about medicine and doctors. A number of the stories reflect on the advantages that wealth, connections, and education bestow on people who question their &#8220;first opinion&#8221; treatments. Like Atul Gawande&#8217;s <em>Complications<\/em> (although not quite as brilliantly), <em>Second Opinions<\/em> vividly shows that while skilled and intuitive physicians can do remarkable things, as a species we&#8217;re still holding a guttering candle in the darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The medical mystery\/doctor&#8217;s experiences genre is a favorite of mine. This exemplar comes from one of the New Yorker&#8216;s stable of medical professionals who also write extremely well (where do they find them, I wonder? did Berton Rouech\u00e9 start a special school?) The most striking story is from the prologue: Groopman&#8217;s own experience of insisting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4718,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/4718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}