The Laws of Medicine

Posted on 15 December 2017 by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Essential, required reading for doctors and patients alike A Pulitzer Prize winning author and one of the world s premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little known principles that govern medicine and how understanding these principles can empower us all.Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question Is medicine a science Sciences must have laws statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature But does medicine have laws like other sciences Dr Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline culminating in The Laws of Medicine In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see Written with Dr Mukherjee s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well being is being treated Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future. Download The Laws of Medicine Author Siddhartha Mukherjee – kino-fada.fr This is a very short book, but deep It makes you reflect on the practice of medicine and how it might affect you if you had to make decisions for yourself or another The first law of medicine, according to the author is A strong intuition is muchpowerful than a weak test Or, what you think you are seeing islikely the case than what the computer spits out if you ve been doing all the wrong tests or don t know the true circumstances Mukherjee uses as an example a man, a conventio This is a very short book, but deep It makes you reflect on the practice of medicine and how it might affect you if you had to make decisions for yourself or another The first law of medicine, according to the author is A strong intuition is muchpowerful than a weak test Or, what you think you are seeing islikely the case than what the computer spits out if you ve been doing all the wrong tests or don t know the true circumstances Mukherjee uses as an example a man, a conventional banker type, whose sickness he cannot diagnose no matter what test he orders Then he sees him not in a patient context but chatting to a known heroin addict, and thinks maybe he too is a heroin addict and tests for AIDS, which the man has The second law is Normals teach us rules outliers teach us laws That is, pay attention to the one person for who has a different story, a different treatment works for them, or they are the ones to beat the odds It is their studying their d...How does the saying go Sometimes big things come in little packages Which certainly proved true with this book A TED talk on medicine by the noted cancer physician Unfortunately I have hadthan my fair share of dealing with the medical profession, so I always have an interest in books such as this Learned much about the tests that are ordered, how doctors make their decisions, drug trials and what they actually mean Some interesting cases were presented in an easy to understand format How does the saying go Sometimes big things come in little packages Which certainly proved true with this book A TED talk on medicine by the noted cancer physician Unfortunately I have hadthan my fair share of dealing with the medical profession, so I always have an interest in books such as this Learned much about the tests that are ordered, how doctors make their decisions, drug trials and what they actually mean Some interesting cases were presented in an easy to understand for...Law One A strong intuition is muchpowerful than a weak test.Law Two Normals teach us rules outliers teach us laws.Law Three For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.Well, interesting, sort of I would have probably really liked this in the early days of medical school Each law is illustrated with a few examples that give the reader a peek into his medical world You know, the sort of godly laying of the hands and the noble art of medicine world Not th Law One A strong intuition is muchpowerful than a weak test.Law Two Normals teach us rules outliers teach us laws.Law Three For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.Well, interesting, sort of I would have probably really liked this in the early days of me...This is a very short book and makes for a quick and easy read It gives color and light to the concept of priors in Bayes theorem And also reviews a bitabout Bayesian reasoning The author points out why outliers areimportant than inliers in current medicine and are the future of medical theories So, we have two very important concepts being put forward in crystal clear language Bayesian reasoning and outliers as the perfect ones to study when crafting a law of medicine The ana This is a very short book and makes for a quick and easy read It gives color and light to the concept of priors in Bayes theorem And also reviews a bitabout Bayesian reasoning The author points out why outliers areimportant than inliers in current medicine and are the future of medical theories So, we have two very important concepts being put forward in crystal clear language Bayesian reasoning and outliers as the perfect ones to study when crafting a law of medicine The analogies are very good and creatively used.The book may be used by students who are having trouble conceptualizing sensitivity and specificity and the concept of prior But that should actually be very few students Statistics is now a required course And it is included on the MCAT And th...Some professions are passions,than bread and butter To cordon and define them by law or a set of rules is no easy task Medicine is one among them and like Siddhartha Mukherjee says it is the most beautiful and fragile of all Diagnostics and treatment rely greatly on accuracy and consistency but we always need to be intuitive because the outlier always gives us a chance for resea...The Spaces Between the FactsSiddhartha Mukherjee is not only a prominent cancer specialist, he is also the author of the beautifully written but long The Emperor of All Maladies A Biography of Cancer In this very short book he tries to distill the essential features of medicine that make it a science The result is aboutthan medicine, it is an insight into how all of science works, using medicine as a metaphor that is familiar to the reader A doctor is expected to make perfect decisio The Spaces Between the FactsSiddhartha Mukherjee is not only a prominent cancer specialist, he is also the author of the beautifully written but long The Emperor of All Maladies A Biography of Cancer In this very short book he tries to distill the essential features of medicine that make it a science The result is aboutthan medicine, it is an insight into how all of science works, using medicine as a metaphor that is familiar to the reader A doctor is expected to make perfect decisions based on imperfect information Medicine is distinctive in that we patients are not interested in averages, we want to know what is going to happen to us Such certainty is impossible The task of the doctor is to make the best use of the information available.We are gently led into an understanding of Bayesian probability It seems obvious that if you might be sick we should run a bunch of tests and use the results Ah, but he tells us thata test can only be interpreted sanely in the c...Siddhartha Mukherjee is a wonderful teacher and a truly great science writer I recently became a fan as I started to get halfway through his masterpiece book The Emperor of All Maladies I m still yet to finish that one and I ve already bought Gene An Intimate History and I ve already flown through the significantly thinner The Laws of Medicine A cancer physician and researcher, Dr Mukherjee straddles academia, clinical work and research in a way only America makes possible for people and i Siddhartha Mukherjee is a wonderful teacher and a truly great science writer I recently became...I suspect that the vast majority of us know very little about how one becomes a doctor that hasn t been informed by TV shows We expect doctors to diagnose like Dr House or care for us like Dr Dorian or entertain us like Patch Adams Anyone who s gotten a whiff of medical school will be quick to correct our misperceptions, but there are only a few doctors who are bringing the mysterious inner workings of practicing medicine to light for the general public Atul Gawande is one The late Oliver I suspect that the vast majority of us know very little about how one becomes a doctor that hasn t been informed by TV shows We expect doctors to diagnose like Dr House or care for us like Dr Dorian or entertain us like Patch Adams Anyone who s gotten a whiff of medical school will be quick to correct our misperceptions, but there are only a few doctors who are bringing the mysterious inner workings of practicing medicine to light for the general public Atul Gawande is one The late Oliver Sacks was another Siddhartha Mukherjee is a relative newcomer to this part of the literary world His first book, The Emperor o...There is no doubt Mukherjee is an incredible writer However, there were many times while reading this short book I wish it were a lot longer andin depth His description of Bayes Theorem, and the entire book in general, was intended for the layperson Overall, a good exposure to biases we all ha...I pre ordered the book because Siddhartha Mukherjee s Emperor of All Maladies is my all time favorite and the description of why there should be laws in medicine fascinated me.The only disappointment I had was that the ...

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15 December 2017

Siddhartha Mukherjee