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44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Big ego and big health care, December 14, 2009
This review is from: Waking Up Blind - Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery (Hardcover)
As with any industry, there's a place in American health care where big money and big ego cross paths. But in medicine, that intersection is often found in the body and mind of individual Americans.
A distinguished ophthalmologist and clinical professor at Emory, Tom Harbin provides the authoritative account of the rise and rise of Dwight Cavanagh. Performing eye surgeries in impressive numbers, Cavanagh made himself into a money machine for Emory. Not only did the institution receive reimbursement for the procedures; Cavanagh was also adept at winning grants. The whole department prospered. The University built state-of-the art facilities. Everybody seemed to win. Cavanagh was the ophthalmological equivalent of a rock star.
Except that whispers began to spread about whether the patients really needed all those operations. In one case, Cavanagh operated on the wrong eye, blinding a poor man who hadn't clearly needed surgery in the first place. After too many operations on too many borderline patients, the hard-working, honest physicians alongside Cavanagh finally mustered the courage to question the rock star's practices. Cynically, the Emory administration closed ranks, and it was the honest critics whose careers were stunted.
Harbin tells this true story with a novelist's pace and an insider's authority. Waking Up Blind succeeds because it's a gripping story told by an authoritative physician with a graceful and unobtrusive style. It's also an engaging account of how Big Ego and Big Health Care can actually compromise patient outcomes. Arriving in the midst of the national health care debate, Waking Up Blind couldn't be more timely.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Redemption Through Remembrance, February 14, 2010
This review is from: Waking Up Blind - Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery (Hardcover)
Shortly before 6 pm on September 12, 1983, I found myself sitting in the surgery suite at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. What I did not know at the time, but learned later, was that a horrible mistake was about to happen right after I left. The next patient in line, an elderly African American man named Sargus Houston was scheduled to have surgery performed on his right eye, but the surgery was done on the left. That accident set in motion a chain of events that was to alter the lives of countless individuals, including my own, over the next several years. The facts are now spelled out publicly for the first time in Tom Harbin's book (Waking up Blind: Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery, Langdon Street Press, 2009). I was a direct witness to some of the happenings detailed in the book, but mostly what I knew about these events as they were playing out was revealed via the grapevine of whispers in the shadows of the hallways at Emory University. I was only a bystander, but not an emotionally neutral one; more akin to an eyewitness to a mugging.
A quarter of a century has passed since these events occurred, and I am now retired from Emory University. Over the years I heard rumors via the grapevine that numerous lawsuits pertaining to the events I had witnessed had been settled, and that Emory University had been forced to pay out millions of dollars to various injured parties. However, the results of these settled lawsuits were sealed, and I had resigned myself to accepting the reality that the details about what had happened, the good, the bad, and the ugly, would never see the light of day. I am gratified to see that Tom Harbin's book has now shined a spotlight on what was kept hidden for far too long. I have written a longer essay detailing my personal account of some of the happenings that are detailed in the book, and that is posted on my blogsight at [...]
My hope is that this book will start a dialog among my former colleagues at Emory University about what can be done now to right some of the wrongs of the past. Perhaps there can still be redemption through remembrance.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I am an Emory Trained Ophthalmologist, May 30, 2010
This review is from: Waking Up Blind - Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery (Hardcover)
Like several of the reviewers I was unable to put this excellent expose book down. I was forwarned by another ophthalmologist that he turned the pages so fast they almost burst into flames. I read the book in one sitting finishing at 3:00 AM. Reading this is an absolute must for any ophthalmologist, most physicians and any reader that likes the medical genre.
I am a board certified ophthalmologist that trained at Emory's Ophthalmology Department. I left Emory the year before Dwight Cavanaugh (who does not deserve to be called "Doctor") arrived. I applaud the courage and integrity of Dr. Tom Harbin whom I know by reputation as a physician's physician.
This book made me so ashamed of Emory, ashamed of many of the staff physicians that trained me, ashamed of the way that physicians and putative leaders of the field of ophthalmology and Emory University betrayed the trust of their patients and the general public.
I believe it is a travesty of the highest order that Dwight Cavanaugh still has a license to practice medicine, still holds a very high appointment at a medical school department of ophthalmology, and exposed to medical students and residents. In my opinion he should not only have his license taken away from him but he should be in jail for felony "battery" on his unsuspecting and trusting victims.
I am buying 6 of these books and sending them to ophthalmology friends of mine with the admonition to send it to other ophthalmologists after they have read it.
As a further disgusting footnote during this entire mess that Cavanaugh created I was repeatedly ask to donate funds to Emory's Ophthalmology Department to finance all the "wonderful things" that Cavanaugh was doing. This at a time that the development department was fully aware of the many lawsuits and unecessary surgery that Cavanaugh was doing.
For an Emory trained Ophthalmologist this is pure schadenfreude.
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