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Every Patient Tells a Story
Lisa Sanders
Broadway
August 2009
On Sale: August 11, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 0767922468
EAN: 9780767922463
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important
part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine
physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York
Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the
hit Fox TV series House, M.D. "The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a
foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold
while you travel through this other world as unknown as it
is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my
office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really
want to know is, ‘What is wrong with me?’ They want a road
map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The
ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name,
to know it–on some level–restores a measure of control,
independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached
to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently
all a good doctor has to offer." A healthy young man suddenly loses his memory–making him
unable to remember the events of each passing hour. Two
patients diagnosed with Lyme disease improve after
antibiotic treatment–only to have their symptoms
mysteriously return. A young woman lies dying in the
ICU–bleeding, jaundiced, incoherent–and none of her doctors
know what is killing her. In Every Patient Tells a Story,
Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of
solving these and other diagnostic dilemmas, providing a
firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a
doctor to make the right diagnosis. Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the
tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose
illness and disease. And yet mistakes are made, diagnoses
missed, symptoms or tests misunderstood. In this high-tech
world of modern medicine, Sanders shows us that knowledge,
while essential, is not sufficient to unravel the
complexities of illness. She presents an unflinching look
inside the detective story that marks nearly every
illness–the diagnosis–revealing the combination of
uncertainty and intrigue that doctors face when confronting
patients who are sick or dying. Through dramatic stories of
patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the
absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of getting
the patient’s story, the challenges of the physical exam,
the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries
of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. In
Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Sanders chronicles the
real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical
mysteries that not only illustrate the art and science of
diagnosis, but often save the patients’ lives.
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