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4 obres 464 Membres 24 Ressenyes

Obres de Victoria Sweet

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The descriptions of Dr. Sweet's coworkers and patients tended toward caricature much of the time.
 
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soulforged | Hi ha 20 ressenyes més | Jan 7, 2024 |
Amazing how much better medicine can be when the doctor takes her time, and the insurance companies are not pushing for money or deadlines or diagnoses. What a great idea. Of course,towards the end of the book, bureaucrats take over and the hospital turns to garbage. Why don't people get it? Trust me. I just got OUT of a hospital and I would've done better at a place like Laguna Honda.
 
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kwskultety | Hi ha 20 ressenyes més | Jul 4, 2023 |
Fascinating look at the only public almshouse in America, detailing the history of its transition from the original facility to the modern, new hospital, paralleled with the author's explorations of ancient medical models. She definitely has a point of view and strongly held opinions, so she's an 'unreliable narrator,' but her biases are clear and humane and mostly admirable.
 
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wordloversf | Hi ha 20 ressenyes més | Aug 14, 2021 |
I loved her previous book, God's Hotel, exploring the care of the most vulnerable in a dying breed of hospital. Intelligent, erudite, insightful, and deeply humane, Sweet tells a slightly more personal story this time, how she came to medicine, how she learned it, and the serious moral, intellectual, ethical and spiritual question her career path led her to investigate. I will confess, my heart sank when she revealed her profound admiration for Carl Jung, the Nazi-sympathizing, dishonest, creative and utterly flaky developer of the pernicious personality theories that have tainted Human Resource Departments everywhere with the likes of Myers-Briggs and its bastard offspring "Total Insights," dumbed down to the point where you don't even get to use words for the types, only colors. But I digress.

I still liked this book a lot. She opens with the harrowing and unconscionable mistreatment of her elderly father, subjected by the hospital to days of inappropriate and even dangerous treatments for a condition he did not have, that his attending-physician-of-the-day knew he did not have, and yet was unable to change the diagnosis in that new Bible of medicine, the electronic medical record. Only by pretending his family was removing him for hospice care (God love the hospice folks, who supported them) were they able to get him out of there, feed him and allow him to recover. Sweet muses on the intersection of, conflict between, and potential synergy of "fast" (high-tech, multiple-labs, treat-every-single-thing-that-shows-up-no-matter-what) medicine, and a "slow" medicine, led by relationships, caution, setting priorities, and looking at the patient as a complex living organism in their own unique environmental "niche." She considers and applies elements of other models of medicine: Chinese traditional, Ayurvedic, and that of the medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen, to add value and alternatives to the mechanistic clinical basis of modern medicine. She ponders on what being a doctor does to a person, what sort of doctor she herself has become, and how she got there. And - most worryingly - her picture of the future of American medicine is a bleak one indeed: corporate, money-focused, treatment decisions being made by "quality managers" and other "Upstairs" types who write themselves 15% raises while refusing a raise above minimum wage for the medical assistants downstairs for years on end.

If there were more Victoria Sweets, I would be less fearful. Her portraits of patients are humane, dignified, and warm, and she seems truly grateful to them for all she has learned from them. Ironically, staff at the hospital who treated her father so badly had read her earlier book in their book club; she had presented to them at the invitation of the medical staff. Apparently, not much of what she said made it into a checkbox on the EMR, and languished unheeded. A cautionary tale.
… (més)
 
Marcat
JulieStielstra | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | May 17, 2021 |

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Estadístiques

Obres
4
Membres
464
Popularitat
#53,001
Valoració
4.1
Ressenyes
24
ISBN
14

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