One Doctor

Wow, this book was LONG! More than 15 heures! But it was really fascinating and I don’t regret having started it. I first saw the book in one of the episodes of Elementary. Joan Watson was reading it, and so I became intrigued. In this first-person narrative, this doctor talks about his life as a doctor in several different contexts, his thoughts on the changes that are taking place in medicine, the difference between new and « dinosaur » doctors, problems he sees in the healthcare system, his patients, his family, his worries, his regrets, his mistakes, his successes… His final words about his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, were particularly sad: he said that no person in the entire universe, no monk, no prisoner, no one in the world is more lonely than people with Alzheimer’s. And his debate throughout the book about the tendency of doctors to do everything they can to try to save their patients, even when what they do might actually hurt their patients, just so that they can say with good conscience that they have tried everything, was particularly interesting. That’s what I liked the most about this book, the discussions about « how much is too much » and « what do we do when we don’t know what to do. »

Another discussion that I found was particularly interesting was about the cost of healthcare and how it is becoming a business. He talks about people with money who literally use up the resources that are then no longer available for people without money, the problem with insurances, the problem with politics, the problem with mentally ill patients, and many more other problems. This is not a new book (it was published in 2014) and I would love to know what he thinks about the state of healthcare today, especially during and after the pandemic.

The narrator was excellent, and I really enjoyed listening to this book, even though I sometimes got confused because he talks about many of his patients. I forgot who had HIV, who had cancer, whose niece or wife was obnoxious, whose heart valve was replaced years ago, whose husband was dishonest, who was rich, who wanted to go back to his native country, who was an engineer and compared anatomy to his work on plane engines… But all these patients were fascinating, and they really exemplified how complex and touching and sad it can be to be a doctor.