Customer Reviews

Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How Patients, Families, and Physicians Can Cope with Uncertainty

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Why or why not submit to (techincal) battery in the name of better health? Because intervention always works? Because we patients deeply want to believe intervention will help? Because providers want us to believe it will help? Because it's faster? Because it's better?

This book lays out the pieces of medical choice-making in the context of the probabilities that underlie all desision making. It suggests that principled gambling is seminal to medical choices and makes suggestions, via numerous clinical vignettes, of how medical practice needs to change so that patients and practitioners can make better choices rather than those based on blind faith, short-term clinical efficiency, and shamanistic egos.

In short, this book deconstructs the mechanistic (know-it-all) paradigm of medical practice and replaces it with a probabilistic (don't know it all) paradigm that would, in most cases, be fairer and kinder to all.

Medicine would be a better place if the suggestions in this book were adopted.

My 2-star rating only has to do with the problem that the index is missing several pages - nothing to do with the contents of the book which I very much look forward to reading. The index ends with Principia Mathematica on page 454 even though on that same page another entry says "See also Probabilistic Paradigm" - which, of course, should come after Principia Mathematica but it is not there. The problem may be broader than just the copy of the book I received because the online version of the index also ends abruptly - I only noticed this after my purchase. So, if you mind having pages of the index missing from your book, be careful with your purchase