Selected Product:
| First, Do No Harm
Mass Market
Author: Lisa Belkin
Publisher: Fawcett
Release Date: 1994-03-02
ISBN-10: 044922290X
ISBN-13: 9780449222904
List Price: $7.99
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
"A powerful, true story of life and death in a major metropolitan hospital...Harrowing... An important book."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
What is life worth? And what is a life worth living? At a time when America faces vital choices about the future of its health care, former NEW YORK TIMES correspondent Lisa Belkin takes a powerful and poignant look at the inner workings of Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas, telling the remarkable, real-life stories of the doctors, patients, families, and hospital administrators who must ask--and ultimately answer--the most profound and heart-rendng questions about life and death.
The humanity of doctors in an often inhumane field
| Customer Rating: | Author Lisa Belkin did her research, in this riveting book. Many who enter the field of medicine do care about helping people; doctors do care about their patients and are frustrated by health insurance, legal concerns and concerns for the patient and their families.
Based in a hospital in Houston, where Belkin did her research, you will not put down this book.
You will feel new empathy for doctors who agonize over the end of life issues with patients and their families.
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Good read
| Customer Rating: | | I enjoyed the book. Makes you think about ethics a bit and the reality of financial constraints on the practice of medicine. |
Great Material
| Customer Rating: | | This book will keep you wanting to turn the page and make it hard to put down the book. This is a great explanation of real life situations that patients and hospitals face everyday. Some of the situations that are hard for some people to understand why hospitals are concerned with matters like money and certain treatments of patients can be explained. |
Inside Texas Medical Center...
| Customer Rating: | Lisa Belkin has created an amazing book here - she definitely did her research. The book consists of a few case studies of patients who pose ethical dilemas. Belkin takes you inside meetings of the ethics committee at the hospital, she takes you to the patient's bedside to see what the patient actually wants. Some of the patients she follows are a young kid who has been hospitalized for 15 years with a terminal condition, beating all odds by staying alive that long, several premature babies, and a man who was paralyzed almost completely after getting shot in the spine. It's a great look at medical ethics - Lisa Belkin's book asks all the right questions.
The book is in a very easy-to-read format - the stories of the patients she follows are all intertwined throughout the book. For example, you'll read about Patrick for 30-or-so pages, and then she'll switch over to update you on Taylor's story. She does this because you are reading the stories in "real time" as they happened; all of this took place in a certain time span in the hospital. It's exciting and fast-paced non-fiction - I read it in two days and didn't put it down.
It will break your heart, because often the ethics committee has to bring money into the discussion, as much as they would like to treat every patient as if money was not an issue. This book is SO worth reading, for anyone who is interested in medicine and healthcare at all. |
You may laugh or may cry, but you won't put this book down
| Customer Rating: | Despite the major advances in knowledge, skills, and technology in the field of medicine, this book shows that ultimately life and death fall back on the human touch. Following the workings of an Ethics Committee in a major urban hospital over several months, Belkin clearly shows that medicine continues to be as much an art as a science and in many cases there are no "right" answers, even when decisions can affect whether a patient lives or dies.
This is not a dry, mechanical review of how ethical decisions are made. Quite the opposite, the book captures your full attention from the very first page. You become fully involved in the heart-wrenching lives of actual hospital patients, as well as the no-win situations health care professionals and family members find themselves in when struggling with decisions that literally have life or death consequences.
For example, when she describes the process in which the life support devices are withdrawn from a young patient you feel you are there in the room witnessing the tragedy. Some readers might scream within their minds not to do it - perhaps there is something else can be done? Others may feel a sense of loving compassion over the ending of someone's suffering. Both types will feel incredible compassion for those who had to make the actual decision and hopefully will never have to make such a choice in their own lives. |
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