The Best of Medicine: Doctors, Patients, and the Covenant of Caring [Hardcover]

Michael D'Antonio (Author), Michael Magee (Author), Mike Magee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

A pediatrician in New York inspires her own patient, a girl with sickle cell anemia, to become a doctor herself.

An oncologist in Chicago lets go of her preconceived ideas about gay life as she becomes friends with a man who has AIDS.

A general practitioner in Chattanooga uses literature to heal, prescribing novels and poetry to go with good medicine.

These are just three of the wonderful doctors who practice The Best Medicine and who, along with their patients, can be found in these pages. Each of the twenty-five doctor-patient relationships portrayed in this book reveals ways we can all improve our health, our lives, and our communities.

For too long the value of the doctor-patient relationship has been ignored in the national debate over healthcare. Many Americans, who have lost their connections to their doctors, may even view such a relationship as old-fashioned and maybe even too expensive. The truth is, doctors who know their patients well can provide not only the best, but the most cost-effective care as well.

All of us eventually play the patient's role. At some point a relationship with a doctor becomes central to our lives, even a matter of life and death. The Best Medicine shows the value of forming a close bond between doctor and patient well before a crisis arises, and it shows us all how to do it even in the world of modern healthcare.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In a cheerful, optimistic book, Magee and D'Antonio give 25 accounts of doctor-patient relationships. They don't clarify either how they selected the subjects or who they conceive as their audience. At any rate, these doctors and patients represent a variety of racial, age, and residential statuses. The doctors all seem to be in private or group practice, but none in HMOs. One of them, Clif Cleaveland, has written an entire, excellent book on this book's subject, Sacred Space (1998). Most of these doctors and patients have cooperative, understanding, close relationships in which each is a partner in living, ameliorating, and healing. From their experiences, Magee and D'Antonio educe the cardinal points for patients and doctors in developing good relationships, so that the book might help both groups. Although they sound saccharine as described, these accounts often touch on serious matters, such as patients' and family members' anxieties, terminal diseases, "pulling the plug," and physician-assisted suicide. William Beatty

From Kirkus Reviews

While hurried and impersonal doctor visits may be the norm in managed care, exemplary doctor-patient relationships still exist, as revealed here through brief first-person narratives by 24 caring physicians and their appreciative patients. Magee (The Fifty Most Positive Doctors in America, not reviewed) and Pulitzer-winning journalist D'Antonio (Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of Americas Nuclear Arsenal, 1993) convened a panel of patients and physicians to define the responsibilities of each. Their recommendationspatients should be truthful, take responsibility, and speak up; doctors should be competent, communicate clearly, listen well, and see their patients as people, not diseasesare reflected in the stories collected here. Most of the physicians in these vignettes were recommended by peers who recognized their special ability to relate to patients. They represent over a dozen states, plus Puerto Rico, and include general practitioners and surgeons as well as specialists in gerontology, psychiatry, oncology, and other fields. Their common bond is the regard they have for the people they treat. Each chapter follows the same pattern: introduction of one or more patients or their parents, who describe a positive experience with the doctor, followed by introduction of the physician, who then talks about his or her approach to patient care in general and to that patient in particular. The stories depict the physicians as perceptive and compassionate, the very sort one would want to meet. Few of the stories are especially memorable, perhaps because they are so brief that the characters in them dont come alive. Two that do stand out concern a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma and the battered woman whose face and self-confidence she restores at no charge and a doctor in rural Maine who still makes house calls, sometimes to settle domestic disputes. A feel-good read, offering welcome evidence, although purely anecdotal, that satisfactory, even rewarding, doctor-patient relationships continue to thrive. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312241844
• ISBN-13: 978-0312241841
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,741,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars What Medicine Should Be, February 15, 2009

By 

Maryallene Otis (Lynnwood, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best of Medicine: Doctors, Patients, and the Covenant of Caring (Hardcover)

The Best Medicine is a collection of stories about doctors who love their work. Patients are portrayed as the partners and customers of the doctors in working toward better health. The personal interaction shown between doctors and patients is, I think, what most of us wish for, instead of the horrendous impersonal bureaucracy that medicine has become. If government regulation of medicine were ended and we got rid of all third party payer systems, this book is what medicine could and should be like. Doctors and patients as partners working together. Government intervention in medicine makes them adversaries,